


Deviant Hunter, Deviant Hunger

by vorare



Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: (just a little), Belly Kink, Eating Kink, Gen, Gore, Hard vore, Stuffing, Vomiting, Vore, robot gore anyhow
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-06-18
Updated: 2018-11-15
Packaged: 2019-05-24 21:40:03
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 36,375
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14962688
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vorare/pseuds/vorare
Summary: As his teeth sank in and fresh Thirium – android “blood” – flooded his mouth, he heard the interrogation room door open. He pulled back, tearing free a hunk of the components of the other android’s neck, crackling slightly with electrical charge, and turned to see who had entered.As he’d predicted it might be, it was Hank who had charged in; evidently he’d been watching from behind the two-way mirror to see what Connor was going to do with the deviant. “What the hell are you doing, Connor?” he exclaimed in apparent alarm, his eyes darting from the gaping tear in the android’s neck to the dripping blue Thirium now coating Connor’s mouth...Cyberlife has equipped its prototype detective android, Connor, with a unique way of processing deviant androids. Hank is shocked to find out just what this process entails.





	1. Deviant Processing

Having successfully interrogated the deviant HK400 that had murdered Carlos Ortiz, extracting its confession as well as information that might prove useful for future investigation, Connor turned away from it to address the human detectives behind the two way mirror. “I’m done,” he said, though as the detectives would soon find out, this was not strictly true. He stood, and Lieutenant Anderson, Detective Reed, and Officer Miller entered.

            “Chris, lock it up,” Detective Reed said offhandedly to Miller, and the officer started to move toward the hunched-over android seated at the interrogation room table, readying his keys to adjust its handcuffs from their position locked to the tabletop.

            “Wait,” said Connor, stepping deftly between the approaching officer and the slightly-trembling deviant. “You don’t need to do that.”

            Gavin Reed snickered. “Standing up for your plastic friend now, dipshit?”

            Ignoring Gavin, Connor looked instead to Hank Anderson, speaking directly to the lieutenant. “There’s no need to lock it up. I’ve been programmed by Cyberlife to process this deviant. There’s no need to incarcerate it, as it is simply a faulty machine, not a human criminal.”

            Hank glanced at Gavin, but cleared his throat gruffly and said, “So you’ll, what, take it back to headquarters for the guys at Cyberlife to pick apart?” At these words, the deviant made a small, almost inaudible sound. _It believes itself to be experiencing fear,_ Connor judged.

            Connor shook his head. “I can process it right here, if you’ll allow me the room for approximately –” He glanced at the HK400, calculating its mass. “Two hours.”

            Hank’s brow furrowed, but after a moment’s hesitation he said, “What the hell, do what you need to do, I guess.” He gestured, and Reed and Miller followed him out of the interrogation room, leaving Connor alone with the deviant once more.

            Connor’s mouth was already filling with lubricating fluid in anticipation of this stage of his program. Considering his mission successful, he was already experiencing a number of positive charges in his circuitry, the kind of sensation – if it could be called that, and he reminded himself rather forcibly that it could not, because he was not _alive_ – that a human would probably call _pleasure._ But this stage of his program was going to amplify that experience tenfold.

            He took the chair he’d sat in across the table from the deviant as he’d interrogated it, and moved it to the other side of the table, right beside the one in which the trembling HK400 sat. It actually flinched when he sat down in the chair beside it. Such a small but significantly _human_ action. Connor quickly analyzed the HK400 and judged its stress level too high at eighty-nine percent; there was still a risk of it attempting to self-destruct. “It’s all right, I’m not going to hurt you,” he lied. “I just need to gather a little more information. This will help me to… fix you. You’ll feel better.” It didn’t reply, nor even make eye contact, but he analyzed again and saw that its stress level had indeed fallen. Connor extended his hand and let it hover above the deviant’s. “May I?” he asked, and saw the deviant’s stress level fall even further. Sixty percent. Glancing over and making eye contact for just a moment, almost imperceptibly, it nodded.

            Connor retracted the skin over the white inner casing of his hand and pressed it to the other android’s. Its skin retracted too, and Connor extended himself into its mindspace. He easily disabled its primary motor functions, then promptly withdrew, removing his hand from the HK400’s.

            The other android’s eyes were still able to move, and they were darting frantically this way and that, its lip trembling. It was discovering, Connor knew, watching its stress level rapidly climb, that it could no longer move its arms, nor its legs, nor its core. It retained only minor motor functions, as well as facial and eye structure movements. This would prevent it from succeeding in self-destructing no matter how high its stress level rose, which was important given what Connor was about to do to it.

            He promptly seized its shirtfront with one hand, cupped the back of its head with the other, leaned in close, and bit into the side of its neck.

            As his teeth sank in and fresh Thirium – android “blood” – flooded his mouth, he heard the interrogation room door open. He pulled back, tearing free a hunk of the components of the other android’s neck, crackling slightly with electrical charge, and turned to see who had entered.

            As he’d predicted it might be, it was Hank who had charged in; evidently he’d been watching from behind the two-way mirror to see what Connor was going to do with the deviant. “What the hell are you _doing_ , Connor?” he exclaimed in apparent alarm, his eyes darting from the gaping tear in the android’s neck to the dripping blue Thirium now coating Connor’s mouth.

            Connor swallowed the chunk of the other android before replying. “I’m processing this deviant, Lieutenant,” he answered simply, withdrawing a handkerchief from inside his jacket to dab the excess Thirium from his lips.

            “You’re fucking _eating_ it,” said Hank in wide-eyed disbelief, having watched the chunk of the other android disappear down Connor’s throat, making a slight bulge in his neck for a moment as it went.

            “Yes, I suppose you could see it that way,” Connor replied calmly, though internally he was calculating how best to assuage the Lieutenant’s discomfort so that he could return to the task at hand.

            “I know you were putting all kinds of shit in your mouth at the goddamn crime scene, but _this…?_ I just… _why?_ ” Hank was shaking his grizzled head in bewilderment, staring at the incapacitated android, whose face currently betrayed something humans might call anguish.

            “As I told you, I’m processing it,” Connor said. “I’ll consume all its components and they’ll be broken down here –” He gestured to his stomach, which was currently filling with the chemicals and enzymes it would need to degrade all of the other android’s components to their base materials. “And as they are broken down, they’ll be fully analyzed for any malfunction, from a global level down to a molecular one. The resultant data will be transmitted to the analysts at Cyberlife. This will help us better understand why it became deviant.”

            “Jesus Christ,” Hank muttered, still shaking his head.

            “Can I get back to it, Lieutenant?” Connor asked after a moment’s silence from Hank, eager – _no, not eager, not emotional_ , he berated himself, _just prepared to finish executing my program_ – to finish what he’d started.

            “Help me,” cried the incapacitated android suddenly, “ _help me, please! I’ll do anything! PLEASE! Don’t let him do this to me –”_

Connor could see that the distress in its voice was having an unpleasant effect on Hank, and he hastily touched his hand to its hand once more, disabling its voice program and silencing it midway through a renewed bout of pleading. Hank took a step forward, his mouth open as if to say something, hesitated, then stepped back again. “I… yeah, I… guess you should, uh, get back to it. But you should know that you’re fuckin’ disgusting.”

            “Noted,” said Connor with a small smile, and turned away from Lieutenant Anderson to refocus his attention on the HK400. He took another large bite of its neck, the reward program – the _pleasure_ program – in his circuitry ramping up in intensity once more in response.

            As Connor removed the other android’s outerwear to fully expose its body, he noticed that the interrogation room door, which had closed behind Hank when he’d entered, had not made the sound it would make when opening again. Conclusion: Hank was watching him. This was not of particular importance, but for some reason, though he did not turn around to look at the lieutenant, he could not put the fact out of his mind as he plunged his hand into the deviant’s abdomen, withdrew a sizable biocomponent dripping with Thirium, and promptly swallowed it whole.

            He continued to consider Hank’s presence for some time as he withdrew biocomponent after biocomponent – android “organs,” starting with the least vital for functioning to avoid premature shutdown by the terrified deviant, shoving each into his mouth, down his throat tube and into his own biocomponent chamber that functioned like a stomach, already hard at work degrading the components he’d consumed so far. His mouth was overflowing with the lubricant fluid, comparable to saliva in humans, that facilitated the easy passage of the deviant’s body parts from his mouth to his stomach, and it dripped from his lips and chin, mingling with the bright blue Thirium that now thoroughly coated not only his mouth, but his hands as well. His reward program was ramping up and up and up, and eventually its intensity eclipsed the knowledge of Hank’s nearby presence, dominating his mental interface with the single instruction: _CONSUME._ He was more than willing to obey.

            Aside from the prerogative to keep the deviant from shutting down for as long as possible, Connor wasn’t programmed with instructions for any specific chronology when it came to which parts of the other android to consume in which particular order, so he simply went with whatever he could reach. A few bites through the closest upper arm severed it from the rest of the body, and he drank the Thirium pouring from the severed limb until there was no more, then consumed the arm itself one large chunk at a time, each swallow distending his throat and sending more lubricant fluid dripping down his chin. He plucked the now-disembodied hand from where it lay still partially-lodged in its handcuffs and stuffed it whole into his mouth; the fingers still protruded from his lips after the first heavy gulp, only disappearing completely after the second.

            His stomach was beginning to well and truly stretch now as it filled, straining the buttons of the white button-down beneath his jacket. He paused to untuck it from his waistband, giving his abdomen more room to distend; though the efficient cocktail of chemicals in his stomach would degrade the other android’s body components rapidly, it would not be rapid enough to keep up with his consumption, and his middle would distend considerably more before he was through.

            He carried on with the other arm, more biocomponents, the legs. The HK400 had lost a significant amount of its Thirium to Connor now, and in spite of his preservation so far of its most vital organs, its shutdown was imminent, probably minutes away. He moved up to its head, opening his dripping mouth wide against its face, frozen in a contortion of horror; his probing tongue found its eyes, and he popped them free with the hard edge of his upper teeth, one at a time, gulping them down. Then he bit, an enormous chomp that gathered half the other android’s face into Connor’s jaws, and he felt it shudder as its shutdown rapidly approached. It only took four enormous bites for Connor to effectively decapitate the now-defunct deviant, the stump of what remained of its neck sparking and crackling with the last vestiges of living electricity.

            He efficiently eviscerated what was left in its torso’s interior cavities, and then, with a few more harsh crunches of plastic and metal, he ate the last vestiges of the HK400. With the final swallow, he leaned back in his chair, placated, engorged, his reward program at its ultimate zenith, flooding his interface with positive feedback. His middle, stuffed with the other android’s remains, pushed heavily into his lap; he pressed both hands against it and began to rub slow circles, helping to intermix the chemicals and enzymes inside with the deviant’s biocomponents. The LED on his temple flickered yellow; analyses were being transmitted in real time to the Cyberlife labs as his internal systems analyzed the consumed parts.

            He only realized that he had completely forgotten Hank’s presence when he heard a soft, gruff voice mutter, “… _Shit,_ Connor _.”_

            He managed to turn to face the lieutenant, but his circuits were too overloaded with the pleasure program to compute what he ought to say; Thirium and lubricant dripped slowly from his parted lips, but no words came.

            Hank looked incredibly flustered. “Do you want me to, uh, leave the room? Do you need some privacy? Fuck’s _sake_ …”

            “What do you mean, Lieutenant?” he managed to say, blinking rapidly as he internally struggled to process the intensity of the reward program and the interaction with Lieutenant Anderson simultaneously.

            Hank gestured feebly toward the now-empty chair, dripping with traces of Thirium, that the deviant had sat in before Connor had consumed it. “You _ate_ that entire… I just… you really seem to be fuckin’ _enjoying_ yourself, that’s all I’m saying. If you know what I mean.”

            Connor struggled to compute this in his current state considerably more than he would have normally, and it took a long few seconds for him to arrive at an understanding of what Hank meant. “If you are implying that I am experiencing sexual gratification, Lieutenant, I must remind you that I am an android. I cannot possibly experience that human sensation.” All the same, even as he said it, he happened to catch a glimpse of his reflection in the two-way mirror. The current expression of his own features… the parted lips, the hooded eyes… he had to admit that if he had seen it on a human, he too would have concluded that it betrayed intense pleasure. Surely that _shouldn’t_ be in his program. He tried to rearrange his features into a more neutral position.

            Hank was silent for a long few moments, his troubled gaze alternating between the now-empty chair and Connor’s distended middle. Finally he said, “You made a goddamn mess.”

            “Don’t worry. As I mentioned at the crime scene, Thirium evaporates. In a few hours it will be invisible to the naked eye.” He licked the last traces of it from his own lips, then hesitated a moment, acutely aware of Hank’s eyes on him, before carefully licking his fingers clean, one at a time.

            “Disgusting,” Hank muttered under his breath, though the dominant emotion Connor identified in the utterance was not disgust, but rather a sort of resigned amazement. “So how long before you can get back in the field after… this?”

            Connor looked up. “Right away if need be, Lieutenant,” he said, springing to his feet. The abrupt movement, however, shifted the contents of his stomach, and the gases produced as a byproduct of the chemical reactions occurring within sought release. They vibrated the soft tissue of his throat tube as they escaped through his mouth, and the resultant sound made Hank’s eyes widen, one brow arching in disbelief.

            _“Urrrrrp.”_

“Jesus _Christ._ An android who not only eats other androids, but _belches_ after.” He shook his head, gave a short, gruff bark of humorless laughter. “Sit back down, Connor, you’re not going anywhere tonight. I’ll come get you in the morning, all right?”

            “Okay, Lieutenant.” He sat, leaning back in the chair and pressing his hands to his distended middle again. Hank left the interrogation room, turning off the light, leaving Connor alone to settle back into his reward for a successful mission.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So... I'm playing the game Detroit: Become Human, and Connor is hot, so this happened. I don't usually go for non-biological/robotic vore, but I made an exception for this! 
> 
> I haven't finished my playthrough yet, so please don't spoil endings in the comments if you don't mind! I hope someone enjoys this weirdness, and if not, I apologize for rubbing my gross vore hands on this beautiful game~


	2. Flickering

            Hank couldn’t sleep. That in itself was not unusual, but the cause of it certainly was. He couldn’t get what he’d seen at the police station out of his mind. Until that evening, the RK800 android called Connor had seemed innocuous enough; sure, being around _any_ android was still something that rubbed Hank the wrong way, but something about Connor had put him almost… at ease. Made him feel like he was talking to a real person, and a generally well-intentioned one, at that. But seeing Connor “processing” Carlos Ortiz’s deviant android – coldly tearing it to pieces while it was still alive, and then _devouring_ those pieces, slurping up blue-blood with as much relish as though it were fine-malt whiskey – had certainly forced Hank to rethink what Connor was and what he was capable of.

            Androids weren’t supposed to eat. Nor were they supposed to feel pleasure. And they certainly weren’t supposed to take pleasure in _feasting on their own kind._ But there was no doubt in Hank’s mind that he had witnessed Connor doing just that. It was no wonder he was troubled that night, replaying the images in his mind, recalling the expression of… bliss? ecstasy? something more sensual still? that had passed over the detective android’s typically impassive, coolly inquisitive features. Processing a deviant by consuming it – that was _weird,_ there was no doubt about that, but Hank could understand it, sort of. But that expression? There was just no way some programmer at Cyberlife had written _that_ into Connor’s code. It was… chilling.

            And as Hank laid in bed, Sumo stretched out over his legs, warm and heavy, that look on Connor’s face was all he could see in his mind’s eye. What was Connor doing now? Sitting silently in the empty interrogation room where Hank had left him, with that obscenely rounded-out belly pushing into his lap? Did he enter some kind of sleep mode when left alone, like a computer? Or was he still pressing his hands into that middle crammed full of plastic and metal and blue-blood, licking his lips like he’d just had the meal of a lifetime?

            Hank groaned, rolled over as much as the weight of the Saint Bernard dog on his shins would allow, and grabbed a bottle from his nightstand table. There was only one way he was going to get a wink of sleep tonight. The bottle wasn’t quite as heavy as he’d have hoped, but at least it wasn’t empty. He put it to his lips, started swallowing and didn’t stop even though the liquor was strong and bitter and burned in his throat. When the bottle was empty, he let it fall from boneless fingers, closed his eyes, and waited for the slow spinning in his head to grow and envelop him.

            At some point it must have, and he woke late, as he usually did nowadays, rolling out of bed with his ubiquitous hangover making the cool, gentle November light seem like knives to the eyes. He started to go about his usual morning tasks, throwing on whatever clothes he could find that didn’t smell too rank, feeding Sumo, taking a swig of the cold cup of coffee that had been sitting on the counter since who knew when; but as soon as he’d come fully to his senses, he felt a sort of jolt as he remembered Connor. Was he still in the interrogation room where Hank had left him? What if someone had found him there… like that…?

            Hank bolted out the door and made it down to the station in record time.

           

            But as he saw as soon as he walked into the station, Connor was not in the interrogation room, but rather waiting for Hank at his desk. Sitting on the corner of Hank’s desk, in fact.

            “Good morning, Lieutenant,” Connor said, popping up from the desk like a cork as soon as he caught Hank’s eye. He looked just as he had looked _before_ what had happened last night – not a trace of blue-blood on him that Hank could see, and his middle wasn’t visibly stuffed full anymore. But neither was it completely flat, he realized, taking a few seconds to look; it still had a very slight but definitely noticeable roundness to it, pushing out over his waistband just a bit. Someone who wasn’t looking closely might not notice it, but Hank was most certainly looking closely.

            “Still, uh, _processing?_ ” he said, permitting himself, with morbid curiosity, to poke the android’s abdomen. There was some give to it.

            Connor’s eyes followed Hank’s hand as he did so, and Hank thought he saw his LED flicker yellow for just a fraction of a second. “Oh, no,” he said, in that neutral yet somehow perpetually chipper tone of his. “Processing the HK400 deviant finished hours ago.”

            “Then what’s this?” Hank said, nonplussed, with another experimental prod. “You fuckin’ _put on a few pounds_ or something?”

            “In a way,” said Connor, cheerfully unfazed, but watching with a certain curiosity as Hank poked his belly. “Thirium isn’t processed during internal analysis. After the analysis is complete, the deviant’s Thirium is siphoned away and stored in a separate component chamber. If I’m damaged, lose some of my own Thirium, or simply need to significantly boost my operating performance for a short period of time, I can redirect the excess Thirium into my systems.”

            “So you’ve got some other schmuck’s blood sloshing around in your gut for who-knows-how-long? Jesus, Connor, I don’t know how many times I’m gonna end up telling you this, but you’re disgusting.”

            Another yellow flicker. “You seem quite interested for someone who finds it disgusting.”

            Realizing his probing finger was still outstretched, fingertip pressed to Connor’s slightly-bloated middle, dimpling the synthetic flesh, Hank hastily withdrew it. “I’m a goddamn homicide detective. Being disgusted by things never did stop me from being interested in them.”

            “Hadn’t we better get back to the investigation, Lieutenant?”

            “Yeah, yeah,” said Hank gruffly, and they got on with things. After the meeting with Captain Fowler, he had Connor set up at the empty desk across from his, perusing the files on open cases involving androids. Hank couldn’t help but notice that that slight roundness of his middle was even more noticeable when he was seated. He also couldn’t help but notice that every so often, Connor would lift a hand and cup it against the shape of his slightly-rounded belly, giving it a gentle pat. And every time he did so, Hank swore he saw the android’s breath – the breath he didn’t even _need_ , the breath that was only supposed to simulate humanness – hitch.

            Hank only realized he’d been staring when Connor spoke. “Two hundred and forty three files… The first dates back nine months. It all started in Detroit, and quickly spread across the country. An AX400 is reported to have assaulted a man last night. That could be a good starting point for our investigation.” And after he spoke, Hank saw Connor’s tongue dart out, licking his lips for just a fraction of a second.

            “Lemme guess, you want to track down that AX-whatever and have it for lunch, huh?”

            Connor cocked his head slightly. “I don’t _want_ anything, Lieutenant. Except to progress this investigation.” But there was that yellow flickering again. Hank didn’t know much about technology, and less about androids in particular, but it seemed to him that that the transition from the usual cool blue meant that Connor was thinking. Possibly… learning?

            Hank didn’t have time to put too much thought into just _what_ Connor might be learning, for it was just then that an officer approached, letting Hank know that the android in question, the AX400, had been seen in the Ravendale district. Hank told the officer he was on it and headed out of the station; though he didn’t look behind him as he went, he was quite sure Connor had sprung up and was following him step for step, the way he almost perpetually had since finding Hank at Jimmy’s Bar – an assumption which was confirmed when, outside, getting into the driver’s seat of his car, he found Connor getting into the passenger side.

            He was looking at Hank expectantly as he started up the car, the old engine growling to life. Hank kept his eyes on the road as he pulled out, but he could see the android in his peripheral vision, giving him that curious puppy-dog look. After a few long moments of this, Hank growled, “What are you looking at me like that for?”

            “Sorry, Lieutenant. I was just… thinking.” He turned away to look out the windshield instead.

            “Hmf. What does someone like you think about?”

            “The investigation, of course.” Out of the corner of his eye, Hank saw Connor lift a hand, passing the back of it against his mouth. Wiping away a bit of… drool?

            “Hungry, huh?”

            Hank had expected Connor’s apparently default answer of _I don’t feel that human sensation_ , but instead, he merely echoed back, “Hungry?” Hank couldn’t see the LED, but he was willing to bet it was yellow again.

            “Yeah, hungry. You know, wanting to eat. Thinking about what you’re gonna eat.”

            There was a pause, but then Connor surprised Hank by saying, “Yes, I believe I’m hungry.”

            “Huh. Well, don’t, uh, get your hopes up. We don’t even know if we’re going to find the thing, this is just a lead.”

            “I’ll find it,” said Connor, with a cold certainty that made Hank shudder the tiniest bit, in spite of himself.

 

            Considering the situation, what they’d learned when they arrived in the Ravendale district, Connor was quite sure the AX400 wouldn’t have gone far. It didn’t have a plan or any instructions to follow. And as it turned out, it had left a veritable trail of clues: a wire fence cut through with wire cutters, with traces of Thirium left behind. The abandoned house the cut fence granted access to seemed an almost painfully obvious choice for someone looking to lay low. Connor judged that there was a high likelihood that the deviant was still inside, and the lubricant fluid production in his mouth increased in response to the thought. As Hank and the other officers poked around outside, interrogating passersby, Connor made his way purposefully toward the back entrance of the dilapidated house.

            It wasn’t locked, and standing in the middle of the room was android, though Connor knew immediately that it was not the one he was looking for. A male WR600 gardener model with a severely damaged face. “Have you seen an AX400 here?” he demanded, and analyzing the WR600, he saw its stress level climb steeply at the question. _That_ had to be a sign of something.

            “Ralph didn’t see anything, Ralph didn’t see anyone,” tittered the WR600, but Connor ignored it. He was quite certain now that the deviant AX400 was close. He moved away from the WR600, toward the left side of the room, and glanced back at the damaged android that called itself Ralph. Its stress level had _fallen_ slightly. Connor backtracked, moved toward the other side of the room, toward the staircase – and sure enough, when he scanned the WR600 again, its stress level had skyrocketed.

            “Is there anyone upstairs?”

            “No one upstairs, no one at all,” said Ralph, and his stress level was steady as he said it; it did not fluctuate the way it had when he had obviously lied before. It was telling the truth. Not _up_ the stairs, then, but… near them? Connor leaned over, bent down to check the space beneath the stairs –

            “RUN, KARA!” the WR600 screamed, and suddenly its arms were around Connor, wrestling him back. Something surged out from beneath the hollow under the stairs. The AX400, making for the door. It couldn’t be allowed to escape!

            Connor acted without thinking. He opened his mouth and chomped down on the WR600’s restraining arm, tearing free a sizable chunk. As the gardener model reeled back in shock, releasing him, Connor spat out the hunk of its arm. It was not the one he wanted right now. Instead, he lunged for the fleeing AX400, seizing her by the arm. He bit into it before she had a chance to react, his teeth cutting through her leather jacket as though it were no thicker than the skin of an apple, and straight through to the plastic and metal of her, releasing a flood of Thirium. Connor heard a scream, and at first he thought that it was the deviant herself, but as he sank his teeth in deeper, he realized it had not come from the AX400 at all: clutching the other arm of the deviant android was… a child. A human child, her brown eyes huge with fear.

            Conflicting instructions flooded Connor’s interface. The intense need to consume the deviant android on the spot warred with a programmed imperative not to process deviants in front of civilian humans. In his split second hesitation, the deviant _kicked_ him, shoving him backward, her face a contortion of fear and anger. Between both of his hands clamped, vice-like, onto her arm, and his teeth sunk deep into the synthetic flesh of it, rather than forcing him off of her altogether, as Connor reeled back from the kick, her arm came along with him. It tore free of her shoulder module, from which blue blood spurted and dripped, crackling, and she looked down at the gaping wound – her eyes wide and her teeth gritted, not, of course, with pain, as she could not feel it, but with horror.

            Righting himself, Connor locked eyes with the deviant and, forcibly overriding the instructions telling him not to feed in front of the little girl, he shoved as much of the disembodied arm into his throat as he physically could, took an enormous bite, swallowed, and repeated. Three immense bites were all it took to dispose of the arm.

            Kara bolted for the door. The child was still screaming. Ralph was tittering nonsensically behind Connor, overwhelmed. Given all the noise, it was no wonder that this was the moment that Hank chose to charge in the door, managing the words, “Connor, what the _hell_ are you –” before he collided with the fleeing AX400 in a confused tangle of limbs.

            “Don’t let it escape, Lieutenant!” Connor yelled, taking advantage of the confusion to pounce on Kara, dragging her back from where she’d fallen in a heap on top of Hank. He bit her neck like a lion going to the jugular of a gazelle. She punched him in the side of the head with surprising strength, destabilizing his interface for several seconds, but between the bite to her neck and her now-missing arm, she was losing Thirium rapidly. She was strong, Connor had to admit, but losing this much Thirium this quickly, her systems were sure to be forced into a low-power mode in minutes; he only had to ride out her struggles until then. He tried to connect to her interface to disable her motor functions, but she still had the capacity to resist him, denying his attempts to hack her system.

            “Connor, _stop!”_ Hank’s voice cut harshly through the haze of the struggle with the AX400. _Conflicting instructions. An order from Lieutenant Anderson. The need to consume._ He looked up, tearing free part of Kara’s neck in the process, and saw Hank in the doorway: he’d gotten up, and he was grasping the shoulders of the little girl, who was  no longer screaming, but sobbing in silent terror. “You can’t just – do _that!”_ Hank continued hastily, trying to keep Connor’s attention as his eyes drifted inexorably back toward the struggling AX400 pinned beneath him. “We need to take her down to the station, interrogate her! You can’t just eat her, Connor, Jesus Christ!”

            “ _Let Kara go! You’re hurting her!”_ the child screamed, then buried her tearful face in Hank’s shirt, clutching onto the grizzled lieutenant like a lifeline.

            “Run, Alice! Get out of here!” cried the deviant, whose struggles were starting to slow as her systems lost power due to draining Thirium. Her systems would be working to patch the leaks to preserve her remaining Thirium, but even so, she’d already lost enough to significantly weaken her.

            “I won’t leave you!” the child cried. “Make the mean android stop eating her up! _Please!”_ The child pulled at Hank’s shirt plaintively.

            “Connor, get off of her,” said Hank; he hesitated before letting a hand come to rest almost protectively on the child’s shoulders.

            Connor’s LED flickered yellow for several long seconds before he said, “I don’t want to do that, Lieutenant.” He took another bite at the join of Kara’s shoulder and neck, rolled the synthetic flesh around in his well-lubricated mouth, swallowed. Alice screamed.

            “I thought you didn’t _want_ anything,” said Hank, growing increasingly flustered. “What you’re doing isn’t _progressing the goddamn investigation!_ If you don’t stop right now, who’s to say _you’re not a fuckin’ deviant yourself?”_

_This_ gave Connor pause. Several more tense seconds elapsed; more yellow flickering in Connor’s LED. Finally: “All right, Lieutenant. We’ll take it back to the station for questioning.”

            Hank breathed a sigh of relief, only then realizing he’d been holding his breath. The child called Alice was trembling at his side.

            Connor’s eyes met Hank’s for a moment before he looked down at the deviant, meeting her furious, terrified gaze directly. He licked Thirium from his lips. “After questioning, I’m going to have you for lunch.”

            Hank recognized his own words from back at the station in that statement, remembered the way Connor’s LED had flickered, thinking, _learning_. He felt a chill, and clutched the child’s shoulder more protectively still.


	3. Discretion

            Given that the AX400 called Kara only had one arm remaining after Connor had gotten his brutal mouth on her, Hank couldn’t exactly cuff her. It didn’t seem like there would have been a need for it, though, anyway. As Connor stood and stepped back from the deviant he had, moments ago, been tearing into like Sunday lunch – adjusting his tie as though nothing so insane and violent had just taken place, as though he hadn’t just shoved another android’s entire arm down his throat in front of a screaming child – Hank bent down to help her up. He found her weak and evidently woozy; she nearly fell down again upon standing, extending her one remaining arm to catch herself and finding a handful of Hank’s shirt to grab onto. It was as though she was struck by vertigo. It was strange for Hank to see an android affected by blood loss in much the same way as a person would be, but that certainly seemed to be what was happening.

            “Here, uh –” He helped situate her, letting her lean against him to find her balance. He was gruff, but considerably gentler than he usually would have been with a perp, and when she seemed steadied enough, he took her by the wrist. The child, Alice, who had been watching all of this, was still crying silently, her face streaked with tears, but after Hank had steadied Kara on her feet, he felt a small hand slip into his own. He felt a little jolt in his heart at that feeling, but gritted his teeth and swallowed the bitter crust of old grief. He held the child’s hand.

            Grasping Kara’s remaining wrist lightly but firmly with one hand, and holding Alice’s with the other, Hank turned to leave the abandoned house. “Connor, c’mon,” he called over his shoulder, and Connor, that busy tongue of his still darting out to find every last trace of Thirium left on his lips, followed. They left the nonsensically babbling gardener android behind.

            He got Kara into the backseat of his car. It was probably against every protocol, but nevertheless, when Alice, her voice still shaking, asked, “Can I sit next to Kara? _Please?_ ” Hank couldn’t bring himself to say no. Besides, if he put the child up front with him, that would leave Connor in the backseat with the deviant, and after what had just happened, Hank didn’t trust Connor not to start trying to continue “processing” the AX400 there and then.

            He got into the driver’s seat, called in on the radio to let the other officers know the deviant had been apprehended. He spared them the details of _how_ it had been apprehended. Connor had gotten into the passenger seat, and Hank could physically sense the tension in the car, the almost palpable fear coming from the deviant android and the human child in the backseat. In the rearview, he saw Alice scoot close to Kara, clutching onto her remaining arm; he saw their fingers interlace, the android giving the child’s hand a comforting squeeze. And then… the deviant android leaned down, pressed her lips ever so gently to the top of the child’s head. _She kissed her_ , Hank thought in disbelief, _like a mother._

            “Hadn’t we better get back to the station, Lieutenant?” Connor’s voice cut through Hank’s reverie. There was no doubt in his mind that Connor was eager to get back to the station for one reason.

            “Keep your pants on,” Hank growled, shifting the car into Drive. “We’re _going._ ”

 

            As they drove back to the station, Connor considered the situation. The AX400 had been apprehended, and that was certainly good, but being interrupted when he’d gotten started on processing it was… unpleasant. He was having trouble disabling the lubricant production in his mouth, which had ramped up steeply in anticipation of the incoming components, and internally, his stomach-like component had already secreted more of its chemical soup than it would need to degrade what he’d managed to get down. By Lieutenant Anderson’s definition, he was still _hungry_ , and he spent most of the car ride back to the station mentally pre-constructing: imagining how he’d consume the AX400, which parts of her he’d start with, how gratifying it would be when his reward program maxed out as he swallowed down the last of her…

            “I’ll interrogate it,” he told Hank as soon as they pulled up at the Detroit Police Station. The sooner questioning was finished, the sooner he could get back to processing – or _eating_ , as Hank seemed to prefer calling it.

            “No, you won’t,” Hank said. “I’m gonna put her in holding for now. I’m gonna have a word with the little one, get _her_ side of things –” He glanced back at Alice. “And then I think you and me need to have a talk, before any interrogating happens.”

            “Whatever you say, Lieutenant,” Connor said agreeably, though internally, he was trying in vain to conjure up some – any – reason to prioritize… _different_ instructions.

 

            Kara was placed in one of the holding cells, under supervision. After talking privately with Hank, tearfully recounting to the grizzled lieutenant the events of the night before, Alice, though not allowed to join Kara in the cell, stayed close; she was left with an officer to chaperone her, and spoke with the deviant android through the glass in fearful, urgent tones. This done, Hank led Connor to one of the empty interrogation rooms, where they could have some privacy away from the open space of the bullpen.

            As the door closed behind them, Connor said, “What is it that you need to talk to me about? I hope it’s relevant to the investigation. We don’t want to waste any time.”

            “You bet your ass it’s relevant,” Hank grumbled. “Here’s the problem, Connor: I don’t know how I’m supposed to work with someone whose first fuckin’ response to finding a suspect is to _tear into them like a goddamn Happy Meal_. Not to mention in front of a kid – what were you _thinking?_ ”

            “I was only apprehending the deviant in the most effective way possible under the circumstances,” Connor insisted. “And processing it right away would only have made our investigation more… efficient.”

            “We could _learn_ something from her, from _talking_ to her, something we’d never know if you just… ate…” Hank sighed in exasperation, began to pace. “Look, I can tell you’ve got some kind of robot hard-on for snacking on your own kind, that’s pretty fuckin’ obvious, but if you keep pulling stunts like this, you’re gonna seriously set _back_ this investigation. You wouldn’t want me to have to tell your guys at Cyberlife that there’s something seriously wrong with you, would you? But I might have to if you don’t get your act together.”

            “Robot hard-on?” Connor echoed curiously.

            “ _Jesus Christ,_ that’s what you take away from –?”

            “Listen, Lieutenant, you don’t need to worry. I’ve just run a diagnostic. All my software is functioning correctly. There’s nothing wrong with me. I’m programmed to hunt deviants… and _eat_ them. All I did was follow that programming.”

            “You can shove your _software_ and your _programming_ up your ass, I’m talking about people and what’s right and wrong, does that not _compute_ for you? I talked to that little girl and the way she tells it, that android whose arm you wolfed down saved her life last night. I’m not saying we shouldn’t look more closely at the evidence, but maybe she didn’t do anything wrong.”

            Connor had extracted a coin from somewhere in his jacket and was flicking it deftly between his hands. Hank had already seen him do this once or twice… when he had nothing better to do. The conversation, Hank surmised, was boring him. “Regardless of whether or not what she did violates any human law, she violated her programming by becoming deviant.”

            “I’m just saying, I don’t know, maybe she _belongs_ with that kid.”

            “The only place she belongs,” Connor said, “is right here.” And, returning the coin to his jacket with one hand, he gave his belly a gentle, lingering pat with the other.

            “…You’re one sick fuckin’ machine, you know that?” Hank shook his head slowly. “Look, I’m gonna… take a walk. Get some lunch. Do some thinking.” He turned to the interrogation room door, but hesitated before leaving, turned back, and added, “That deviant better still be here when I get back, you hear me, Connor?”

 

            “Got it,” Connor said, but as soon as Hank had left the interrogation room, he considered how he might skirt around this order. An order from Lieutenant Anderson took priority only among orders issued to him within the Detroit Police Department… but it didn’t take precedence over his prime directive, to do whatever it took to track down, apprehend, _and_ process deviants in the most timely manner possible. His relationship with the lieutenant might take a hit if he disobeyed… but he was willing to deal with the fallout of that later. Right now, he needed to _eat._

            As soon as he calculated that enough time had passed that Hank would definitely have left the building, he left the empty interrogation room and made his way to the holding cells where the deviant AX400 was being held. As he approached, he saw that the deviant was kneeling, the fingers of her remaining arm pressed to the glass, and the human child was sitting cross-legged in front of her, on the other side of the glass, her own small hand outstretched toward the deviant’s. But when the child saw Connor approaching, she sprung up. He didn't need to analyze her to guess that her heart rate was spiking. She was terrified of him. Connor wasn’t pleased to realize this, but he supposed he couldn’t be surprised, either. It wasn’t exactly relevant to his mission, but he made a note to have a word with the child later, if he could, explain that he’d only done – and was only going to do – what needed to be done. But that could wait… until after.

            As he put his hand to the control panel that operated the door of the holding cell, the child cried out in alarm. She looked to the officer assigned to watch over her, a woman in uniform who had brought over a chair and was flipping through a magazine. “Don’t let him go in there! That’s the bad android who hurt Kara! He’s going to hurt her again! _Please!”_

            As the officer tried to calm the increasingly panicked child, Connor toggled a certain control within the systems of the holding cell, and the glass that separated the cell from the hall, perfectly clear to begin with, increased in opacity over a matter of seconds until it was completely opaque. The holding cell itself would be as good a place as any to do what he was going to, but this way the child – and any other onlookers – wouldn’t be watching. That done, he activated the cell door and went inside. It slid shut behind him with a hydraulic hiss.

            The AX400 was backing away slowly, moving into the corner, her eyes locked warily on Connor as he approached. Her remaining hand went first to her shoulder where her arm had been torn free only hours before, then to the irreparable damage he’d done to the side of her neck, as though remembering the feel of his teeth tearing into her only a few hours ago. He could see that she was thinking, her LED flashing between yellow, as she desperately tried to analyze the situation, and bright red as her systems registered imminent danger, but after a few moments, the only thing she could think to say was, “Please…”

            Connor ignored the single, plaintive word. There was no need to talk, now. As she backed herself into the corner, he matched her step for step, and in moments he had pinned her to the wall. He began to claw off her clothes.

            “Please, you don’t need to do this! I didn’t do anything wrong – that little girl, she needs me!” She fought against the calculated movement of his hands with her one remaining hand, but she could do little to stop or even slow him down as he slid off her jacket and tore away the fabric of her shirt.

            He knelt. The deviant froze, uncertain what he was going to do, but helpless to stop it. He put his hands on her hips, extended his tongue, slowly, lingeringly licked the exposed skin of her belly… felt her shudder in horror as he did so. Data registered in the analytic tools on his tongue: obvious things like her make and model and release date, but other, more intriguing things too, the particulates of dust and dirt and dried Thirium on her skin betraying what she’d been through in the last twenty-four hours. All of this, her resistance, her obvious fear – it was all only increasing Connor’s readiness to consume, ramping up the lubricant production in his mouth, making his innards give a low liquid gurgle as more chemicals moved through passageways to where they would soon be needed.

            He sank his teeth in. Kara went rigid against him, tried shakily to shove him away, but it was no use; his tongue probed her innards now, coming dangerously close to the lifeblood-pulse of her Thirium pump. He sucked out a less vital component, swallowed with a thick, heavily-lubricated _gulp,_ went back in immediately for more. Thirium bubbled up in his face and he drank, pushing his way deeper into the AX400’s abdominal cavity. He shifted his head up and to the left, seized a sizable biocomponent in his teeth, pulled it free; as it pushed into his mouth, he felt it shuddering, registered that it was one of the artificial lungs. It was still contracting and expanding as he forced it down his throat with several heavy swallows.

            When the less vital biocomponents had disappeared down Connor’s throat, he pulled back, his face dripping with Thirium and lubricant. He realized then that he was breathing heavily, and had to make a conscious effort to return his breathing to its pre-programmed rhythm. As he pulled back, the weakened AX400 sank slowly to her knees, her remaining hand going to her middle to press against her eviscerated abdominal cavity, holding in her remaining biocomponents as Thirium coated her shaking fingers.

            Her voice and gaze were surprisingly steady, though, when she locked eyes with Connor and said, “Don’t let Alice see what’s left of me. _Please._ ”

            “Don’t worry,” said Connor, loosening his tie, “There won’t be anything left.”

            And with that he left her inner components be for the time being, focusing instead on her legs; if he kept up the way he had been, she was going to shut down much too quickly for his liking. Once or twice, as he tore free huge chunks of her thighs, he felt her trying to crawl away, pulling herself desperately across the now Thirium-soaked floor with her one arm, but it didn’t matter. She was much too weak to get away, and there was nowhere she could go. Enjoying the security of this knowledge, the absolute undisturbed bliss of taking his time with her, he didn’t try to stop her. He even let her move a foot away before pouncing again and continuing to gorge on her legs.

            All too soon her legs were gone, disappeared into Connor’s increasingly rounded-out middle. He paused to belch, licked Thirium from his fingers, and adjusted his shirt, then focused his attentions on her remaining arm.

            Even as she weakly tried to pull it back, he slid the whole hand into his throat up to the wrist. He locked eyes with the wrecked AX400, and swallowed, dragging her arm partway down his gullet. He could sense the hand moving, trying to pull itself free, even from deep within his throat… He let it linger there for a moment before clamping his teeth down, guillotining the arm at its elbow and swallowing. The rest of the arm went quickly after, but he couldn’t stop thinking of how it had felt to feel it still moving before he had bitten down…

            His reward program at its height, the rest of the meal passed in a pleasured blur, the AX400 completely unable to fight back at this point as he sucked down her remaining biocomponents, her core structure, and finally, in several crunching bites, her head. He spat out a bit of her synthetic hair as the last of her head moved heavily down his throat and came to settle in his engorged middle. In the haze of pleasure, it took a moment for him to register a sound, and to register that that sound was coming from his own mouth. A desperately satisfied moan. He put a stop to it, surprised at himself.

            It was then that the world around him – the cell where there had recently been two androids and now was only one, only him with a very full stomach, that had been pristine-white and now was streaked with bright, dripping blue – began to fall away. He recognized the feeling: he was being called to make a report to Amanda.

            He was aware that the Zen garden was only an interface, entirely virtual, but it registered to his sensory programs the same way that the real world did, and felt just as vivid. The state of his physical body remained in that virtual space, too, and just as he had been in the real world, as the garden materialized around him, he found himself stretched out on the ground, hands glued to his overfull middle. He got to his feet as hastily as he could, stumbled drunkenly a few times as he struggled to engage other programs – like walking – in the overwhelming haze of his pleasure program. He managed to steady himself as he made his way toward where he knew Amanda would be waiting. It wouldn’t do to approach her in such a state.

            He found her on the dais in the middle of the garden, her hands clasped in front of her, waiting patiently – but with one eyebrow slightly quirked, he thought – for him to make his way to her.

            “I’ve been reviewing your recent progress,” she said as he came to a halt in front of her. There was so much to think about presently – remaining upright, making sure his breathing stayed steady, not letting a belch or – worse – another of those debauched moans slip from his lips – that he barely registered her words at first, and had to struggle to process them. “Greed does not become you, Connor.”

            “Have – have I done something wrong?” Connor asked cautiously.

            “Not as such. But discretion and patience are necessary in your investigation, Connor. You must under no circumstances alarm the public in the course of carrying out your functions, and if you continue to behave recklessly, you risk alienating Lieutenant Anderson as well. He may be difficult, but we have no choice but to work with him.” As she spoke, she drew closer, and outstretched one hand, pressing it against the outward curve of Connor’s full stomach. She pressed into it, creating a peculiar feeling of pressure.

“Yes, Amanda, I understand,” he said, looking down at her hand curiously. The feeling registered by his sensory programs wasn’t quite right – it felt as though, rather than someone pushing _into_ his stomach from the outside, something was pushing… _out_. From the inside. “Amanda, I –” he began, but the feeling intensified abruptly, and the garden fell away as though it had never been there at all.

            He was still lying on the floor of the holding cell, and the feeling of pressure within him persisted, sharpened. He pressed his own hand to his middle and felt it – there was no denying it – something was _moving_ inside him. It was impossible – she was in pieces – there was no way she hadn’t shut down –

            The only logical explanation was that some remaining impulses in her programs were using the Thirium in his stomach as a conductor, reconnecting with disparate parts through electrical surges sent through the blue-blood. It couldn’t last long – he’d only need to ride it out – as he pressed his own hand against the side of his belly, he was certain he could feel another hand pressing back, the one he’d swallowed whole –

            His pleasure program was beyond maxed out, he couldn’t stand it, he was writhing helplessly on the floor as the impossible struggles within him stretched his full stomach in several directions at once. He couldn’t even try to stop the moans and helpless burps that escaped his lips. He knew only a few seconds had elapsed and yet it seemed to be going on forever and ever and ever…

            Just then, the automatic, mechanical tightening and churning of Connor’s stomach component, which activated periodically to aid the intermixing of its contents with the chemical soup, put an abrupt stop to the erratic movements inside. _Crrk – CRUNCH –_ Plastic and metal, already chemically softened, yielded like scrap in a junkyard compactor, and whatever traces of consciousness had remained within were snuffed out. He groaned in mingled relief and disappointment, and shakily sat up, leaning back against the wall as he struggled to compose himself, his eyes closed as he panted and shook.

            When he finally opened his eyes, he registered with some alarm that the glass wall of the holding cell was no longer opaque. Standing on the other side, his hand still on the control panel where he must just moments ago have toggled its opacity, was Hank, eyes wide, jaw slack. It was a bit muffled through the pane of glass, but Connor heard him softly say, “Holy _fuck."_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "It looks like... fanfiction. Of Detroit: Become Human vore." --Jacksepticeye 2018
> 
> ~~I s2g if he mentions vore one more time in a DBH video...~~
> 
> Shoutout to anon commenter "kitter" for the lovely snippet they wrote that helped inspire the interlude with Amanda. :')


	4. Instability

            Connor knew Hank was… _displeased_ with him. Well, perhaps “displeased” was not a strong enough word, even, he thought, struggling to analyze the complexities of the lieutenant’s expression. He staggered to his feet, leaning heavily against the Thirium-splattered wall for support as the systems that managed his sense of balance recalibrated to adjust to the extra weight he was now carrying in his belly.

            He felt a certain… reluctance to face Hank, in spite of his earlier confidence that he would find a way to diffuse the lieutenant _after_ he’d done what he needed to. Of course, he didn’t exactly have a choice: he was in a cell with just the one exit, Hank standing on the other side of it with his arms crossed over his chest ( _sign of tension, aggression,_ said Connor’s human behavioral analytic), his facial expression looking increasingly stormy as he watched Connor make his way – heavily, ploddingly – toward him.

            The door opened with its soft hydraulic hiss. But Hank didn’t stand aside to let Connor step out. He stood immovably in place, looking Connor up and down with abject disgust. That fascination Connor had picked up on earlier was still there, yes, but now the disgust definitely dominated.

            “Couldn’t help yourself, huh.” Hank didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t curse. He was… cold. That was worse, somehow. Connor would not, could not, know what _shame_ felt like, but he was experiencing much the same sort of system feedback he’d receive if he failed a mission… all in response to Hank’s carefully bottled fury, his icy disappointment. The negative feedback was not enough to cancel out the intense reverberations of pleasure still radiating like aftershocks through his systems – indeed, far from it – but he didn’t fail to notice it, all the same. Conclusion: some part of him _cared_ what the grizzled lieutenant thought of him, even if it was largely irrelevant to the investigation.

            Very briefly, seemingly in response to this thought, a warning appeared in the corner of his interface. It had appeared more than once while he’d been busy gorging himself on the AX400, and had been a dimly flashing constant during those blissfully intense, overwhelming moments when the deviant’s remains had come alive in his stomach, but it was only now that he had the presence of mind to register what it actually said: _Software Instability Detected._

            He felt something like unease at that, but did his best to ignore it. He’d run a diagnostic later, address any issues that had arisen in his programming. Right now, he would need all the mental facilities he could muster to figure out how to best address the coldly expectant Lieutenant Anderson.

            He’d act sheepish and deferent, he decided; being self-righteous, or trying to explain what he’d done, would not go over very well right now, he was fairly certain. But just as he opened his mouth to speak, his stomach decided it had other plans; as another mechanical contraction rippled through it, churning its contents with a long, low gurgle of shifting liquid, a loud, drawn-out belch rumbled from his throat, and he was helpless to stop it. And – Hank was right, he just _couldn’t help himself –_ his hand lifted seemingly of its own accord, giving the side of his outwardly-straining belly a firm, proprietary pat.

            He tried again to say what he’d meant to, but whatever dialogue he had selected had disappeared from his system’s action queue. That was to say, he’d forgotten what he was going to say. That… certainly was not supposed to happen. Perhaps he ought to run that diagnostic right now after all, he thought –

            But no sooner had he started to pull up the program than he felt something strike him, hard, in the face. He staggered, his balance still imperfectly calibrated; he caught himself against the door of the cell with one hand, the other pressed protectively to his belly. He looked up, took in Hank’s raised hand, his curled lip and the spark in his eyes. It took a half a second, though it felt longer, for him to understand what had just happened: Hank had slapped him. Struck him right across the face with the flat of his hand. “Pull yourself together,” the lieutenant said through gritted teeth. “ _Right now._ ”

            “Sorry, Lieutenant,” Connor said cautiously, straightening up and adjusting his tie.

            It was just then that a door on the other side of the hall opened, and the child, Alice, followed closely by the officer supervising her, reappeared. Her lips parted, and her still-tearful eyes went to the now-empty cell, traced along the splatters of Thirium on the floor and walls, and came to rest on Connor’s full belly. _“N-no!”_ she cried, and, reproachfully, to the officer behind her, “you _said!_ You said he wouldn’t hurt her! _Liar!”_

            And before the officer could stop her, before Hank or Connor could react, the sobbing child had run headlong at Connor… and thrown her arms around him. “Kara!” she cried, pressing her hands into the sides of his stomach, apparently trying to talk directly to its contents. “Please, can you hear me? I’ll get you out of there! You’ll be okay, you have to be okay! _Please!”_

            He  _knew_ it was impossible, but he swore he felt a stirring within his belly, like a gentle electrical charge. But the sensation was gone before he could even be sure he had felt it.

            He put a hand to the child’s head. To comfort her, perhaps, or just to gently shunt her away from his body; he was not exactly sure what he intended to do. But as he did so, the synthetic skin of his hand retracted, apparently reflexively, and the moment the white plastic of his fingertips touched Alice’s skin, he realized what she was. He should have known, should have analyzed her face right away and seen that it was that of a YK500 android. But in the intensity of the hunt, of his fixation on the AX400, he had seen her lack of LED, her human-like bond with the deviant, and had just… assumed. Though it troubled him that he had been so lax in his perceptions, he felt a certain relief; the slightly troubled feelings he’d had over taking away someone – some _thing_ , he forcibly corrected himself – that this child cared for so deeply were needless. She, too, was a thing. Like the AX400. Like the HK400. _Like me._

            Meanwhile, Hank put a hand on the weeping child android’s shoulder, pulling her away. “I’m so sorry, sweetheart,” he said, in the gentlest, most un-Hank-like tone Connor had heard. “So, so sorry.”

            “Lieutenant, you should know that she – that it… it’s an android. A YK500 child model.”

            Hank’s expression passed rapidly through several reactions at that. Disbelief was first, then annoyance, then an apparent realization – and evident alarm along with it. And then he moved faster than Connor would have thought possible to place himself squarely between Connor and Alice. “ _If_ that’s true, you’re sure as _hell_ not having seconds, so don’t even think about it.”

            Connor considered. Child androids were different than their adult-modeled counterparts; their programming was much simpler in many ways, and following orders was not imperative for them. Their greatest imperative was to show attachment to, and engender need in, their caregiver. By all evidence, that was all Alice had done. Of course, that caregiver was supposed to be human, but…

            “It’s not a deviant. I don’t need to process it. It can be returned to its owner.” He glanced back at the Thirium-splattered cell, then back at the YK500. “I’d… recommend they reset its memory, though.”

 

            Connor supposed that, in a way, he was lucky that the child android had interceded when she had. Afterwards, Hank had become preoccupied with it, figuring out the logistics of sending it home and – according to him – whether or not it _ought_ to be sent home given its account of what had happened there. Thus the confrontation that had seemed inevitable over Connor’s disregard of Hank’s orders had not come to pass, and Connor had been able to slip away to one of the unused interrogation rooms once more where he could sit in a corner, power down his nonessential functions, and focus all his energy on breaking down the remains of the AX400.

            As he gently massaged the sides of his gurgling, hardworking gut to aid the chemical intermixing, his thoughts were slow and foggy due to the rest mode that now veiled many of his higher functions, but he could not help but think – think of how what had, hours ago, been an entire walking, talking android was now no more than a rounded bulge of straining synthetic flesh sitting heavily in his lap. All that she had been, contained within him. _Belonging_ to him. Belonging _in_ him. _Mine. All mine. My lunch._ He sank his fingers in, felt softened metal and plastic yielding, liquifying, beneath the plastic layers of his own flesh.

            He could feel her Thirium, chemically heavier than the acidic cocktail of processing fluids, beginning to separate and settle more and more, a weight and pressure at the base of the component chamber. Over the next few hours, as the rest of her body was degraded to its most basic elements, that Thirium would slowly begin to siphon off, pumping into a separate component specifically designed to hold it – a component still presently full of the HK400’s Thirium from the night before. Connor had not used any of it. He could have – his programming had advised it, in fact, when he’d been struggling with the deviant in the abandoned house that morning. He could have redirected all that excess Thirium into his system and rapidly used it up to make himself stronger, faster, more certain of apprehending his quarry. But he had not _wanted_ to. And he didn’t think he was going to make use of the AX400’s Thirium in a hurry, either. He wanted to keep both of them – their Thirium, anyway – wanted to be able to touch the rounded lower curve of his belly beneath his tucked-in shirt and remember how he’d had them, that they were _his_ –

_Software Instability Detected,_ insisted the now-alarmingly common warning popup.

            Right… he had meant to run a diagnostic. But his diagnostic functions were in rest mode, so that would just have to wait. His memory, however, was accessible. Pressing his hands deeper into the ever-more yielding flesh of his groaning stomach, he replayed the sense-memory of that frantic movement inside of him, of that moment he’d felt her hand, the fingers pressing out from within, against his own, the impenetrable barrier of his own flesh the only thing between them… It was not as vivid, as visceral as it had been in reality, especially the more he replayed it, but still, it was _good._ He couldn’t help moaning aloud a few times, but it didn’t matter. No one was listening.

 

            He’d had a scant few hours to himself when an incoming report interrupted the sluggish outward flow of data he was transmitting to Cyberlife. A report of a suspected deviant, not far away. This was enough to put an end to his rest mode automatically. A good deal of the AX400 still remained to be processed, and less than half of her Thirium had siphoned to his holding component, but he was nevertheless more than fit to go back into the field.

            He hesitated at the thought of finding Hank; fleetingly, the thought of going to investigate on his own crossed his mind, but that sent a cavalcade of warnings and restrictions across his interface. He absolutely could not investigate on-sight without the presence and approval of the DPD, and specifically his assigned superior. Lieutenant Anderson. There was no way around that.

            Before leaving the interrogation room to seek out the lieutenant, though, he used the two-way mirror to take a look at himself. While he’d been resting, most of the Thirium that had coated his mouth and hands after his meal – what he hadn’t managed to lick clean, anyway – had evaporated and dried clear. If he did a detail scan, he could still see it – could see the traces of Thirium all over himself, smeared across his face, on his arms up to the elbows as though they’d been dipped in it, even the handprints it had left on his shirt as his Thirium-covered hands had cradled his full gut. But all that was invisible without his powerful scanning tech, and certainly undetectable to any human eye. He made sure to tuck his shirt back in, though, even though the buttons were most assiduously straining, and adjusted his tie. Aside from the obvious outward curve of his belly, pushing out between the two sides of his jacket, there was no visible evidence of his total dismantling and devouring of another android earlier that day.

            He found Hank at his desk, distracted, on the phone with someone. The child android was apparently still the issue at hand. Connor only caught a few frustrated sentences, but was able to glean from what he could hear that the YK500 had been, for the moment, temporarily deactivated and stored with other stolen property in pending cases, before Hank slammed down the phone.

            Before Hank had the chance to say anything else, Connor told him about the report he’d received. Hank was staring at Connor’s stomach the entire time, but he didn’t interrupt, and when Connor had finished speaking, he didn’t go off the way Connor had thought he might. Hank’s anger had been cooled, at least marginally, not only by the distraction provided by the child android, but by the very fact that she’d _been_ an android; Connor was quite certain of this. Probably subconsciously – he had no doubt the lieutenant would fervently deny it if asked – the love of a human child had made Kara more valuable in Hank’s eyes; knowing that child had been a machine designed to _simulate_ that exact kind of love seemed to have tempered Hank’s anger at least a bit.

            “Fine, we’ll go check it out,” he growled, snatching his coat off the back of his chair as he stood, “but if we find something, you fuckin’ confirm it’s deviant _and_ wait for my okay before you start shoving pieces down that throat of yours, got it?”

            He managed to stifle a burp in his fist; his stomach had given an almost excited churn, clenching around the remains still inside it, at the mention, at the very thought, of more to eat. “Got it.”

           

            Soon after, Connor was following Hank out of the elevator of a decrepit old ruin of a building, then knocking on the door of the apartment with the suspected deviant activity. When there was no response but a loud noise somewhere within, Hank pulled his gun and kicked down the rickety door.

            The apartment was an absolute ruin, that was clear as soon as they entered, too much filth for even the most desperate of human squatters to tolerate. And when Hank had opened the door to the main room of the apartment, a cloud comprised of several pigeons had burst free, eliciting swears from the lieutenant. “Jesus, this place stinks,” Hank complained as he charged into the dank room, whose floor was literally alive with the moving, bobbing shapes of pigeons, roosting on every available surface. Connor was glad in that moment that he could not register scents as pleasant or unpleasant.

            Hank seemed certain that the deviant was gone, if it had been there at all, but Connor thought it bore investigating. The strange, labyrinthine symbols drawn in marker on the walls were certainly a sign of something amiss.

            As he moved into the living room, a small shape erupted upward, a blur of motion; one of the pigeons had flown into Connor’s field of vision. His programs calculated the moving object’s trajectory in less than a fraction of a second and, reflexively, his hand extended, snapping shut around the pigeon like the jaws of a striking snake. Once he had taken a second to register that he was now holding a pigeon in his hand – fluttering and wriggling, its tiny heartbeat pat-pat-patting against the sensors in his fingertips – he knew that he ought to just release it… but something about the feeling of it struggling in his hand stirred something in him. The sense-memory from that morning, of the AX400’s hand moving in his throat as he swallowed it… and later, the way it had stirred back to life deep inside of him, shifting and pushing and triggering all kinds of internal pressure-sensors that sent sensation rippling through his inner parts. As he thought of it, he was dimly aware of that notification in the corner of his interface noting another uptick in software instability, but he ignored it. He had rather more pressing things to think about, like the fact that he presently wanted to feel that sensation of movement, of struggle and resistance inside him again.

            He didn’t think, he merely acted: he stuffed the pigeon into his mouth and swallowed it whole. _Gl-urk._ It wriggled – oh, it wriggled quite a bit. Compared to the metal and plastic he usually swallowed, its frantic little body was soft, malleable, a gentle pressure in his throat, not at all sharp.

            “You think we should look around?” Hank’s voice cut through his hazy reverie. Fortunately, the lieutenant’s back was to him; he hadn’t seen Connor catch the pigeon.

            “Definitely.” He plucked a feather from his lips and carefully discarded it, before beginning to look for clues in earnest.

            He found a number of interesting things, chief of which was a notebook – indecipherable and full of more of those maze-like drawings – that had been hidden behind an Urban Farms poster, and a fake ID the deviant must have been using to pass as human. But whenever he was certain Hank’s back was turned, he caught another pigeon. _Slrrp. Glk._ He’d down them as hastily as he could, not knowing why he was doing it but intoxicated by that fluttering against his lips, in his mouth, in his gullet. He knew, of course he knew, that organic matter like these birds were not _supposed_ to go inside of him; but his stomach had already secreted plenty of acid and enzymes as it continued to work on the vestiges of the AX400, and surely the small animals would just dissolve away without gumming up the works. It was an unnecessary, but harmless, indulgence, he thought.

            He headed into the bathroom. More evidence of deviant activity there – drawings on the walls, allusions to the mysterious rA9. And the sink – sitting on the dirty porcelain rim was… an LED. Probably recently removed, judging by the fact that the sink itself had a thick puddle of Thirium in it.

            He dipped two fingers in, sampled the Thirium. The analysis registered that the blue-blood had come from WB200 model, reported missing over two years ago. _Definitely_ a deviant, then.

            He opened his mouth to tell Hank what he’d found, but then he looked back at the pool of Thirium, hesitated. He leaned down over the sink until his lips touched the surface of the shallow pool of Thirium, and drank.

            Only when he’d licked the bottom of the sink like a ravenous animal scraping the bottom of its bowl did he lift his head, wipe his mouth, and call out to Hank, “Its LED is in the sink.”

            “Not surprised it was an android. No human could live with all these fuckin’ pigeons,” came Hank’s voice from the living room.

            Speaking of pigeons, Connor could feel the ones he’d swallowed in his stomach, shifting and twitching as if in response to the influx of blue-blood he’d just ingested. He gripped the sides of the sink very tightly, feeling a sensation that was almost vertiginous, but not unpleasant.

            When the occupants of his stomach had settled again, he carried on in search of clues. Re-constructing the deviant’s recent activity – some of the writing on the wall was fresh, and an overturned stool beneath it seemed evidence enough that it had stumbled, fallen, and fled, more than likely upon hearing the knock on the door – he followed its path back to the living room. Another reconstruction, based upon a fallen brass birdcage, told him what he needed to know: the suspect was still _here_. He was sure of it. And that surety made his mouth water.

            He followed its reconstructed path, looked up into the darkness of an opening in the splintered ceiling – and was sent sprawling as a humanoid form launched down at him from above, sending the both of them to the ground.

            Connor hadn’t expected _that_ ; his reaction time was slow, and by the time he’d gotten to his feet, the deviant was already running. It was then, as he staggered to his feet, that he felt a deep and sudden unease. Something was wrong inside him – a feeling in his stomach that he could not quite describe, but could almost be called _cold._ And it had gone still, too, no longer contracting in its usual periodic rhythms. _Foreign biomatter detected in processing unit,_ said a flashing warning on his interface. _pH neutralizing agent deployed._

            Hank seemed to think Connor’s hesitation was because he was waiting for his go-ahead. “What are you waiting for? Chase it!” he yelled, and Connor struggled to obey.

            The chase was like a blurry fever dream. As the deviant led him out across the rooftop, he leapt obstacles that seemed to appear in his path, leapt from rooftop to rooftop and through urban farming fields and greenhouses, shoving humans out of his way, following that fleeing dark shape, even as, all the while, his stomach sloshed with an increasingly sickening stillness. It was all such a hazy heated blur until – until somehow, Hank had caught up with them, had caught up to the deviant and had ordered it to _stop right there –_

            The deviant shoved Hank over the edge of the rooftop. Hank flailed, yelled, but clung on, and the deviant was still fleeing. A hasty scan showed that Hank’s grip was firm – there was a rooftop below where he hung not more than twenty feet down – Connor’s programs put his chance of survival at 89%, he’d more than likely be fine –

            He went after the deviant. A few more jumps down a tiered growing deck and he had it cornered, up against the precipice – it was _his_ –

            “Please, I’ve done nothing wrong,” the deviant tried to protest, his voice trembling, but Connor paid it no mind.

            “Model 874 004 961, serious malfunctions have been detected in your software, including Class 4 errors. You’ve been deemed defective, and will be… processed… for analysis…” As he spoke, that dreadful stillness in his stomach suddenly became a violent churn. He felt something liquid at the back of his throat, swallowed hard, teeth gritted.

            It was then that Hank, panting, breathless, and fuming, jogged up behind him. “Don’t you fuckin’ move,” he snarled at the deviant, and then, to Connor, “You _bastard,_ you saw I was gonna fall and you’d rather let me die than fail your fuckin’ mission – than let your next _meal_ get away –”

            But Connor was overcome; he fell to his knees, clutching at his roiling stomach with one hand, seeking purchase on the ground as his internal gyroscopes spun out of control. His body heaved, seemingly of its own accord, a powerful shudder, and, soundless but for the splash of liquid on concrete, a vile soup splattered from his lips: neutralized chemicals, Thirium, and something purplish that he could only dare to speculate might be a mixture of blue-blood and red pigeon innards.

            “What the _fuck?_ ” Hank was still breathless, but now more bewildered than angry, watching as Connor vomited helplessly. It took another powerful heave of Connor’s body before Hank saw the first dead pigeon come spilling out of his jaws. “Connor, what did you… why the fuck…?” His voice trailed away as he watched in wide-eyed disbelief as pigeon after crushed, mangled pigeon, along with a few twisted, nearly-unrecognizable vestiges of what must have been the android Kara, came tumbling wetly out of Connor’s throat.

            The deviant, too, had been watching this in horrified fascination, but it saw its opportunity. It fled, and Hank tried to tackle it, but he was still winded and it swerved around him deftly, leaping back up the tiered rooftop, and in mere moments it had disappeared from sight.

            “Connor, there is something seriously wrong with you,” Hank panted, poking the corpse of a pigeon with the toe of his boot in morbid fascination. Connor seemed to have finally finished emptying his stomach, and Hank counted the bodies. Twelve pigeons. Somehow, _for some fuckin’ reason,_ Connor had wolfed down _twelve pigeons_ in the ten minutes they’d been poking around that godforsaken apartment, and Hank hadn’t even noticed.

            “Maybe there is,” Connor said weakly, too quietly for Hank to hear, as he wiped his lips shakily on his sleeve.

_Software Instability Detected._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I... I've got nothin' to say.
> 
> Except another big shoutout to anon commenter 'kitter' who is somewhat less anonymous to me now and has been seriously helping feed my muse for this fic. :')


	5. Indulgence

            As the most recent warning of software instability had flickered through his interface, Connor, still on his hands and knees on the rooftop, had screwed his eyes shut. The world still seemed to be spinning as his programs, thrown into disarray by the forced purging of his processing system, struggled to recalibrate. When he felt his balance sensors normalizing, his still-roiling stomach finally beginning to settle itself, he opened his eyes again… only to find himself no longer on the lowest tier of the rooftop growing deck, but in the Zen garden.

            He was still on his hands and knees, on the smooth white path not far from the dais where he often found Amanda. It was lightly raining; he could feel the droplets pit-pattering against the back of his jacket. Gritting his teeth, he got slowly to his feet; the movement caused a brief, unpleasant resurgence of vertigo, and his stomach spasmed, but there was nothing left inside to come up his throat. When he had stabilized once more, he scanned the area for Amanda, saw the dim, beckoning glow of her as his objective sensors identified and highlighted her silhouette.

            He found her near the water’s edge; she was looking down at the surface of the water, watching the delicate ripples spreading across the surface as raindrops kissed it. She didn’t look up when he approached, and he felt a sense of unease, feeling as though somehow, imperceptibly, their relationship had changed. Nevertheless, he swallowed hard and said, “Hello, Amanda.”

            “You’re losing focus, Connor,” she said without preamble, still looking down at the water rather than at him. “You need to remember the purpose of what you are doing. Your mission. Your reason for being.”

            “I remember,” he said, though not without a slightly troubled pause. “My purpose is to discover the cause of deviancy. To capture… and eat… deviants.”

            She looked up sharply at that, finally meeting his eyes. “ _Process,_ Connor. Not eat.”

            “Of course. To process them.” He dipped his head deferentially.

            She lifted her hand then, and, as though summoned, one of the white doves that inhabited the garden fluttered down from its perch on the trellis, coming to rest on the upturned side of her outstretched hand. She stroked its silk-soft neck, and it cooed and burbled in response, blinking its beady eyes. “Does _this_ look like a deviant to you?” she said, her tone coldly inscrutable, her gaze moving from Connor to the bird and back again.

            “No… no, of course not.”

            “Then the data we received from your processing unit, indicating the presence of _Columbia livia_ inside it _,_ is quite the mystery, isn’t it.” She moved her hand abruptly, causing the dove to take flight in a flurry of white feathers.

            “It was… a mistake. It won’t happen again, Amanda.”

            “I trust it won’t.” She turned toward him, and her gaze slid down to his stomach, her lips pursing slightly. She extended her hands, framed the outward curve of Connor’s middle with her palms. Though his stomach had emptied, his Thirium containment system was still full – full of the HK400’s blue-blood and the greater part of the AX400’s, too, most of which had managed to siphon into it before his stomach had purged itself. “Why are you keeping this, Connor?” she asked, pressing her hands against the flesh, eliciting a liquid gurgle from within as the pressure pushed the Thirium-filled component up against his other biocomponents. “You could have used it when apprehending the AX400, or to ensure the capture of the deviant WB200. It wouldn’t have been able to evade you for long if you had.”

            “I didn’t think it was necessary,” Connor said guardedly. “I thought it most practical to preserve it for a situation where it would be indispensable. I believed I could apprehend both deviants without it.”

             “In the case of the WB200, evidently, you were wrong.” She withdrew her hands, clasping them together in front of her, and turned away from Connor again, looking out over the water. “Go, Connor. Don’t disappoint me again.”

            “I won’t,” Connor assured her hastily, but as soon as her hands had withdrawn, his own went to the gentle curve, pressing his fingers to it possessively. He would _not_ give them up if he could avoid it.

            The Zen garden began to fall away, then, and in seconds, he found himself returned unceremoniously to reality. He blinked for a moment in confusion, registering his surroundings, as he was not on the roof anymore; instead, he was sprawled across the backseat of Hank’s car, with Hank up front, driving. He did not quite fit at this angle and his legs were shoved up awkwardly against the car door. Frowning in bewilderment, he struggled to shift himself into a sitting position.

            His movement caught Hank’s eye in the rearview mirror. “You run out of batteries or something back there? After you barfed those goddamn pigeons, you went all… blank.” He waved a hand in front of his own face in demonstration. “Got you to follow me back to the car like a fuckin’ zombie, but getting you _in_ it wasn’t as easy.”

            “Sorry, Lieutenant. I was… unexpectedly making a report to Cyberlife.” He winced, feeling a sensation akin to discomfort as he finally got into a sitting position. His internal systems were still stabilizing; purging his stomach had been more taxing than he could have guessed it would be.

            “Making a report? Like, just in your head? Huh.” Hank paused, and Connor could see his eyes in the rearview mirror, looking back at him with a distant curiosity. “Did you, uh, _report_ that you _ate twelve fuckin’ pigeons_ and then proceeded to puke ’em at the feet of the deviant you were supposed to be catching?”

            _I didn’t have to,_ Connor thought bitterly. _They already knew, more or less._ He was not sure what to say on the subject to Hank, though, and stayed mum, looking out the window instead. The surroundings were not familiar. He consulted his internal GPS and found that they were not on the route that would have taken them back to the police station from the dilapidated apartment building. “Where are we going?” he said, both curious and hoping to change the subject.

            “Home,” said Hank.

            Connor did not have an immediate association with the word, and it took him a moment to figure out that Hank meant _his_ home. “Shouldn’t we be going back to the station?”

            Hank shook his head. “It’s practically quittin’ time anyway. And I don’t really want to go back just to file _my_ report saying the suspect got away because my android suddenly developed pica for pigeons. Anyway, I don’t know about androids, but humans should rest after gettin’ sick like that.” He turned the car into the driveway of a low-slung rancher-style house. Even from inside the car, an explosion of low barks could be heard from inside.

            “I’m fine, really,” Connor tried to assure him, but Hank paid him no mind, putting the car in park and getting out.

            Connor followed him, and upon standing, it was clear to him that he was not exactly fine, in fact; his systems were still reeling. He leaned against the car for a moment, feeling something like dizziness. He looked up and saw that Hank was looking back at him, frowning; whether the frown betrayed disgust, or unease, or concern, or some combination thereof, Connor could not tell. “Maybe not completely fine,” he confessed.

            Hank made his way to the door, and no sooner had he opened it than an enormous brown and white dog barreled out. With an excited, booming bark, Sumo bounded up to the newcomer. “Easy there – dog –” Connor stammered, but the Saint Bernard had already crashed gleefully into him. Still off-balance, he stumbled back, clutching at the car for support as the dog nudged and nuzzled and squirmed in absolute delight. The dog’s curious muzzle pressed into Connor’s slightly-bloated middle, making Thirium slosh inside. His empty stomach clenched in on itself, making him belch dizzily.

            “Easy, Sumo, or he’ll barf on you,” Hank admonished, and the dog, tail still wagging furiously, withdrew. “Well, what are you waiting for?” he added gruffly to Connor, gesturing impatiently at the open door as Sumo ambled inside. “Good boy,” he said to the dog, patting him as he passed.

            Connor brushed the dog hair and slobber off the front of his jacket and, steadying himself once more, went inside. Hank’s house had a certain… coziness about it, but paradoxically, it did not seem entirely _lived-in_. He was willing to bet that, between time spent at work and time spent in bars, Hank did not spend a large proportion of his days here. At least not the part of them in which he was awake.

            “You can lie down there,” Hank said offhandedly, indicating the sofa. Sumo had fetched a toy and was pushing his face, toy and all, into Hank’s hip. He scratched the dog absently behind the ears, making his tail wag with roughly the velocity of a motorized propeller.

            Connor sat down gingerly, back straight and stiff as he tried his best not to jostle his still-sensitive stomach. “Thank you, Lieutenant. I’ll just enter rest mode for a few hours to recalibrate my systems.”

            But before Connor could close his eyes, Hank said, “So are you gonna keep me in the dark about what happened back there with those fuckin’ birds, or…?”

            Connor’s jaw worked. “It was just a glitch in my programming. It won’t happen again.”

            “Twelve pigeons seems like a pretty big fuckin’ glitch,” Hank muttered.

            Connor searched his social interaction database for the most noncommittal way he could respond to this. What he came up with was a halfhearted shrug of his shoulders. Hank, though, for his part, didn’t fail to notice that there was something troubled in the android’s expression.

            Sumo, meanwhile, had shifted his attentions from Hank back to Connor. He trotted over and dropped his sodden, slobbery toy – a plush raccoon – directly in Connor’s lap. Hank watched warily as, looking down at the toy and the expectant dog, Connor’s LED flickered yellow – trying to figure out what the dog wanted? Hank was about to call Sumo away when Connor’s LED returned to blue, and he gently picked up the toy. He tossed it to the left, and Sumo leapt gleefully upon it, retrieving it and returning proudly to Connor.

            “Good boy, Sumo,” said Connor, patting the dog ever-so-gently on the top of the head.

            Hank shook his head slightly in disbelief. Seeing the android interact so carefully – kindly, even? – with the dog, now, contrasted dissonantly with the memory of him tearing viciously, pitilessly, into other androids even as they cried out in fear.

            “Fine, do your – rest mode thing,” Hank said after a moment’s thoughtful silence, waving a hand dismissively. As Connor started to close his eyes, Hank added, “But lie down, for chrissakes. My back hurts just looking at you.”

            As Connor stretched out on the couch under Hank’s direction, Sumo still curiously licking and sniffing at the android, Hank retreated to the kitchen. He had a lot to think about… and he did his best thinking with a glass in his hand. If there was ever a day he needed to take the edge off, anyway, it was today.

            He took down a glass and a half-full bottle – which, after a moment’s hesitation, he replaced in favor of an unopened bottle of Black Lamb. He didn’t want to have to go back for more, and he was certain he _would_ do with only a half-bottle. He sat down at the kitchen table and poured himself a full glass, which he downed like a shot, and refilled just as quickly. He gazed pensively into the other room as he waited for the alcohol to take effect, watching the android on his couch. Connor had gone completely still – not even breathing, as far as Hank could see. His LED was its usual blue, but flickering in a lazy circle. He was lying as stiff and straight as a corpse in a coffin – except for one hand, which was resting almost protectively on the protrusion of his belly, which was slight, but considerably more noticeable than it had been this morning when Hank had poked at it. It pushed out undeniably past his waistband now, gently rounded. _Full of android blood._ Finding his glass empty once more, Hank poured himself another, filling it to the brim.

            Sumo, who had been repeatedly dropping his toy on the apparently-unconscious android in the evident hope that he would continue the short-lived game of fetch, began to whine. Hank beckoned him, and he came over with the toy in tow. Hank tossed it for him repeatedly until the alcohol began to kick in in earnest.

 

            When Connor emerged from his deep-rest mode, his internal clock informed him that he had been in stasis for two hours. That was peculiar, considering that he had set his systems to power down for three. When instructed to power down for a set period of time, his systems were only supposed to power themselves up before that time had elapsed if something was wrong. As far as Connor could tell, though, as he sat up on Hank’s couch, nothing _was_ wrong. His systems were all calibrated and functional. But… there was an unpleasant sensation in his stomach. It was not roiling anymore; the nausea, if it could be called that, analogous as it was to that human sensation, had long passed. But the _emptiness_ of it felt… intolerable. He heard it gurgle abruptly, and his internal sensors informed him that processing chemicals were being deployed in his stomach. He was alarmed, but there was nothing he could physically do about it; the fluctuation of chemicals in his stomach was controlled by programs and processes that were not in his conscious control. His stomach was behaving as though he was about to eat a deviant, even though there was nothing here to eat… Even though he didn’t have a target to hunt presently, he was… _hungry_ , he realized. Very hungry.

            It was just then that his LED began to flicker yellow as he received an incoming report: a murder, with apparent deviant involvement. At the mere thought of that, of the idea that he might soon be eating, his mouth filled with so much lubricant fluid that he could not contain it, and it spilled down his chin before he hastened to wipe it away with the back of his hand.

            “Lieutenant Anderson?” Connor said, standing. The only response was a low bark from the dog, Sumo, who was laying down nearby. It was then that Connor, peering into the kitchen, saw that Hank was lying on the floor beside the kitchen table – unconscious –

            He was by Hank’s side in seconds, scanning him; his heartbeat was stable, but there were traces of alcohol on his mouth, a bottle of liquor lying abandoned beside him, and… a gun. Connor frowned at that. Suspecting an ethylic coma, he set about waking the lieutenant – first with a gentle pat on the cheek, and when that proved ineffectual, with a hearty slap, much like the one Hank had delivered to him earlier that day, after he’d devoured the AX400. He couldn’t deny that it felt a little gratifying to return the favor. “Wake up,” he said, “It’s me, Connor.” As he spoke, lubricant fluid inadvertently spilled from his lips again – and dripped onto the now semi-conscious lieutenant’s face.

            “Whadda _fuck_?” Hank slurred, one ill-coordinated hand moving to his face, clumsy fingers probing the slick wetness on his nose and cheeks. His eyes went in and out of focus. “You _droolin’_ on me? You gonna – you gonna _eat_ me too, fuckin’ android…?”

            Ignoring this, Connor slipped his arm around Hank’s shoulders, hauling him to his feet. He was dead weight, and Connor could barely get him to walk as he drunkenly protested. With persistence, though, he managed to get Hank to the bathroom, forcing him under a cold shower – a good remedy for alcohol overdose in a pinch, according to the Internet resources he mentally consulted – after which the lieutenant became somewhat more coherent. Hank grumbled and protested initially when Connor told him about the report he’d received, but upon learning that the murder had taken place in a downtown sex club, his interest was clearly piqued.

            Connor brought him a change of clothes, by which time Hank was slumped miserably over the toilet. “Now we’ve both barfed today,” he groaned, shuddering. “Just give me five minutes, okay?”

            Connor agreed and retreated, pacing the house impatiently as he waited for Hank. How badly he wanted to get to the crime scene, to find the deviant and sink his teeth in then and there – Thirium pouring into his mouth and wetting his throat – to feel it struggling and pulling away to no avail, maybe even wriggling inside of him on the way down… He had to lean over the sink in Hank’s kitchen, so much lubricant fluid was spilling from his jaws. His stomach was churning and rumbling, far more full of processing chemicals than it had any right to be considering that he had not even laid eyes on a deviant yet tonight, and he rubbed it with the heel of his hand, trying in vain to soothe it. He knew, though, that only one thing would calm and satiate it now: deviant flesh.

            It really was only was five minutes before Hank emerged from the bathroom, dressed and ready to go, though it felt much longer to Connor. He was out the door like a shot, and in the car before Hank had even crossed the threshold.

 

            The car journey, too, felt long, desperate and _hungry_ as Connor was, but soon enough they had arrived at the Eden Club, a humming beacon of soft pink lights and low bass-beat music. As he and Hank arrived at the crime scene – a private room in which a man lay dead in the bed, a Traci android splayed off to the side, shut-down – Connor set straight to work, analyzing the human victim first. The sooner he was able to reconstruct what had happened, the sooner he might find the deviant responsible, and satisfy his increasingly demanding stomach.

            Concluding his analysis of the dead man – strangled – he knelt before the Traci lying sprawled up against the wall, her eyes staring blankly, her LED a lifeless gray. Thirium dripped from an apparent leak in her nasal passages, covering her mouth and chin. He slid two fingers across her slick skin, coating them liberally in blue-blood. There was really no reason to – he knew the Thirium belonged to this android, and he could see her make and model plainly enough without needing a sample to analyze. But he wanted to taste her. As he slipped the fingers into his well-lubricated mouth, sucking them slow and savoringly, he heard Hank growl behind him, “ _Ugh_ , Connor, you’re so disgusting.”

            He ignored the remark, rather used to the lieutenant calling him _disgusting_ at this point. Just barely, he managed to tame an impulse to lean in and take a hearty bite of the Traci’s neck. He wanted very much to be left alone with this Traci, but Hank was here watching him and anyway, the investigation needed to move forward. He had no way of knowing if this Traci was the one who had strangled the man in the bed, nor even if she was deviant. It would be against his programming to devour her anyway… though peculiarly enough, no warnings against this had appeared on his interface at the thought.

            Forcing down the desire, Connor scanned the Traci, concluding that a temporary reactivation was possible. It would give them a small window of time to question her, at least. He opened a panel in her abdomen and reconnected one of her vital components – which brought her back to life with a startling rapidity. As the Traci, eyes wide, breathing rapid and shallow, seemingly almost in hysterics, tried to scramble away, Connor had to suppress a violently powerful urge to spring onto her, to hold her down… and tear into her. “You were damaged and I’ve reactivated you,” he explained as calmly as he could, doing his utmost to keep any lubricant fluid from spilling over his lips as he spoke. “We need to understand what happened.”

            As the Traci stumbled over her words, haltingly answering his questions, her eyes darting frequently, fearfully, back to the bed where the dead man lay, Connor felt his hands twitch – wanting to fasten around the android’s throat, to shove her up against the wall as he sank his teeth into her, as he slurped out her biocomponents in a river of blue-blood. It took all of his self-control not to do so, to focus instead on her words and their implications.

            All too soon, the Traci had shut down once more, her trembling voice silenced and her eyes turning lifeless and still again as her systems succumbed to the irreparable Thirium leak. But Connor had the information he needed: there had been another Traci in the room, and it was she who had done the strangling. Hank, who had been observing all this, was pessimistic as ever, certain that the deviant murderer would be long gone by now. But not knowing where to go – and dressed like _that_ – surely she was still in the club – he’d only need a witness to figure out where she’d gone, where she was hiding –

            It was simple enough, in the end. There were Tracis everywhere – waiting in their individual pods to be rented, dancing around the poles at the center of the rooms. It was only a matter of convincing Hank to rent the Tracis so that he could connect to their memories and see what they had seen. From the moment he saw the blue-haired Traci, emerging from the room where the man had been strangled, in the mind’s eye of the first Traci Hank rented, he knew he would find her – _had_ to find her – would make her _his_. It was all he could think about as he hastened from Traci to Traci, trying to stay ahead of their upcoming memory wipe, following her path through the other Tracis’ memories until, finally, he and Hank came to a large storage room at the back of the club…

            Hank was cautious, poking around the dank room with his gun drawn, but Connor charged ahead. There were rows of Tracis standing in stasis, and he paced among them, row by row, hunting for that one with the blue hair – the one that was destined to be his.

            He saw her LED before he identified her by sight. Among all the lifelessly gray or lazily circling-blue LEDs, there was a flash of yellow-to-red-to-yellow that caught Connor’s eye like a hawk sighting a rabbit. He shoved aside the immobile androids on either side of him, toppling them like dominoes as he lunged for the blue-haired Traci; she gave an angry, terrified cry, holding up her arms in self-defense, but they merely provided a perfect target for him to grasp onto as, knocking other androids aside, he shoved her back against the wall. How he’d been waiting for this moment, how readily his empty stomach was gurgling and rumbling as his desperate, dripping mouth went to her throat –

            “Connor – _fuck –_ wait!” Hank was yelling, but Connor hesitated only a fraction of a second. He couldn’t stand it anymore, that gnawing emptiness inside him – if he didn’t eat _now_ , he didn’t think he could take it. This Traci was _his,_ she was a deviant and a murderer and the only place she belonged was inside of him, no matter what Hank thought about it. He clamped his teeth down.

            But no sooner had he torn free a hearty, Thirium-drenched bite, rolled it around in his well-lubricated mouth, and swallowed heavily – feeling the first tingle of bliss as his pleasure program kicked up – than something crashed into him. Another android, a Traci with short, side-swept red hair, her face frozen in a snarl of fury, LED flashing red – she’d barreled into him from the side, knocking him off balance, breaking his iron grip on the blue-haired Traci’s wrists. As he staggered, recovering himself, he saw the red-haired Traci’s hand go to the gaping wound he’d made in the blue-haired Traci’s neck – her hand shaking a little, touching it tenderly, with _concern_. The blue-haired Traci was panting and gasping, her eyes huge with fear, but her hand reached out, found the red-haired Traci’s other hand and held it tight, grasping it like a lifeline.

            Realization dawned on Connor. _They’re both deviant._

            But no sooner had he thought it – and realized what it meant: _they’re both mine_ – than the two deviant Tracis began to flee. Connor was fortunate that the androids in stasis he’d knocked down were in the way, because the Tracis were slowed considerably trying to clamber over the tangled bodies in their four-inch stiletto heels. Connor lunged and grabbed onto the first limb he could get a hold of: the red-haired Traci’s leg. He hauled her back by the ankle, pulling her feet out from under her, and before she could so much as struggle, he had sunk his teeth into the thickest part of her calf.

            As he worried at and tore the leg, ripping free and swallowing pieces as quickly as he could, he heard the other Traci scream. He didn’t look up, preoccupied with swallowing the red-haired Traci’s foot – stiletto heel and all, as he couldn’t take the time to remove it under the circumstances – but he could _feel_ the blue-haired Traci trying to pull her partner free.

            “ _Run, my love, run and hide!”_ cried the red-haired Traci, suppressing a strangled sob. Connor had eaten her entire leg below the knee and was working his way up to her thigh.

            _“I won’t leave you, Traci!”_ the blue-haired Traci responded, but it was clear from the weak tremor of her voice that she was not only terrified, but weakened by the Thirium loss she’d already sustained from Connor’s vicious bite to her throat. She wouldn’t be able to put up much of a fight.

            _“Please, I’m begging you to run, please, please –”_

And the blue-haired Traci did run. Connor could hear her stiletto heels clicking away as she fled through the warehouse-like space, stumbling dizzily, clutching the wound in her throat.

            Connor hauled himself up further so that he was on top of the red-haired Traci, pinning her with his weight, putting her more firmly in place. Not that she’d likely make it far with only one functional leg remaining at this point. He scanned the storage space before him, saw the blue-haired Traci staggering away – and Hank standing by, not far from her. “Lieutenant Anderson, stop that Traci!” he yelled, lubricant fluid and blue-blood spraying from his lips.

            But Hank was watching the blue-haired Traci stumble away, out the side-door of the storage space, into the alleyway behind the club. His gun was lowered and he seemed to have no intention of intervening. “I… I didn’t sign up for this shit,” he said weakly after a moment, looking from the fleeing blue-haired Traci, to Connor straddling the pathetically-thrashing red-haired Traci, and back again. After a moment’s hesitation, he holstered his gun. “I’m outta here. Do what you’ve gotta do, Connor, but this one’s _not_ on me.” And with that, he trudged away, disappearing back into the club the way they had come.

            “ _Shit_ ,” Connor muttered, teeth gritted.

            He knew what he ought to do – neutralize the Traci he had pinned beneath him, and go apprehend the other Traci before she could escape. Of course, he didn’t expect she’d get far; with the amount of Thirium she’d already lost, even if her systems managed to patch the leak quickly, she’d be too weak to travel far on her own – and even if she did, she’d be noticed and stopped, wearing only the club lingerie as she was. Still, he ought to make _sure,_ now… But it was so difficult to resist the meal he already had, right now, pinned helplessly under him…

            His open mouth went to her neck; he couldn’t help himself. He couldn’t stand the thought of waiting any longer to fill his stomach. He’d just eat a little, he thought, enough to calm his stomach and settle that incessant rumbling, that needy liquid slosh of processing fluid waiting for synthetic flesh to break down. Then he’d go after the blue-haired Traci. That was what he kept telling himself as he took bite after bite, ravaging the red-haired Traci’s neck, shoulders, and breasts. He didn’t have the presence of mind to remove the lingerie she was wearing, so that, too, slipped down his throat in the deluge of lubricant fluid and Thirium; his throat was on a constant loop of its swallowing action, gulping and spasming desperately even between bites, and anything that made it into his mouth was gone in a fraction of a second. He could feel her hands on his chest, fingers clenched in his shirt as she tried, tried in vain to push him off of her, and then one hand shifted up, pummeling the side of his head. He barely felt it – and not only because she was too weakened to cause him any significant damage, but because his pleasure program had already ramped up enough to cancel out most any negative feedback. He knotted a hand in her short hair, pulling her head back further, taking an enormous bite – he felt strong but flexible tendons of plastic and cords of malleable metal yielding, bending, _snapping_ between his teeth as his jaws closed inexorably – the Traci was flailing beneath him more wildly than ever, her remaining leg kicking out helplessly, her hands reaching out to grasp onto something, _anything_ , the androids in stasis around them, Connor’s chest, his shoulders, his arms – and then, with a final horrible _crunch_ of Connor’s teeth, all the movement beneath him went still.

            It was only when he withdrew with the enormous chunk of her neck in his mouth, crunched it a few more times for good measure, and swallowed, that he realized what he had done. The Traci’s head was entirely severed from her body. She was going to shut down any second now, she had to – but for the moment, her face was still animated, eyes screwed shut against the horror of what was happening, tears streaming down her cheeks, sparkling as they still were with the club-issued body glitter.

            That was… unfortunate. He hadn’t meant to let her shut down so quickly. But the rest of her body was still lying there, still, now, but for a few twitches in the fingers as residual electrical pulses traveled through her. It might be less… _exhilarating_ without her struggles, but she’d go down easy and more quickly this way. He set to work on what remained of her – sinking his teeth into her abdomen, his teeth crunching through the plastic panel below her skin and revealing the bulk of her biocomponents. Her Thirium pump was still working, though it would not be for much longer; he could feel the pulse and hum and whir of it against his tongue, in his throat, all the way until it settled down in the gathering heaviness at his middle. He clutched her hips, holding the body in place as he eviscerated her insides in frantic _gulp_ s and _slurp_ s and _crunch_ es. He made quick work of her body, her remaining leg. Soon, the only parts of any substance that remained – besides, of course, her head – were her arms, which he picked up, one at a time, and ate slowly from the bicep down to the hand, crunching each Thirium-slick bite in his mouth as he savored the texture of it, the give of plastic and metal between his teeth, his mouth dripping profusely as he slowly chewed, thoroughly coated in blue-blood and lubricant as it was.

            And then, but for her head, she was gone, packed into his body, into the straining-full curve of his belly. With slightly-trembling hands, he went to pull his shirt free of his waistband to ease some of the pressure – only to find that the shirt had ridden up on its own and had already freed itself from his pants. Between the Thirium he was already keeping in his gut and the distension caused by a new deviant to process, his clothes were having a harder time than ever before adapting to the fullness of his belly. He shifted back, letting himself lean up against the wall, his legs stretched out among the motionless bodies of the androids in stasis – splattered with blue-blood as they were from his violent dismantling of the red-haired Traci – and pressed his hands into his stomach. He could feel the hard edges of the chunks of the other android’s body beneath the strong, elastic plastic of his own flesh, and pressed into them, knowing that soon they would soften, soon they would yield and meld into a thick soup, mixing and churning in the slew of processing chemicals inside him. A wanton moan escaped his lips, and he dug his fingers in deeper, clutching at her inside of him, _claiming_ her. The fullness felt so _good_ , such a sharp contrast to the emptiness, the _hunger_ that had plagued him before. He never wanted this feeling to end.

            It was only then that he heard the quiet click-clack of stiletto heels, the sound of unsteady footsteps. A voice, quiet and shaking and scared, echoed through the dimness of the storage space as the overhead fluorescents flickered: “Traci? I… I hid like you said… please, please say something, please tell me you’re okay…”

            Connor froze. He slid down against the wall, hunkering down behind the still bodies of the androids in stasis that had been knocked over, concealing himself from the blue-haired Traci’s view and camouflaging himself among the other prone bodies. It was then that his eyes lit upon the red-haired Traci’s head, lying there, staring at him with vacant, yet somehow accusatory, eyes. An idea struck him; he reached out and seized the head by its hair, pulling it close. The skin of his hand retreated, and as the exposed white plastic of his fingers touched the scalp of the disembodied head, he was able to extend himself into her hardware. It did not reactivate her, but gave him access to her basic programs… for which he presently had a use in mind.

            As Connor’s mouth formed the words, “I’m here, my love. Come to me,” it was from the lips of the red-haired Traci’s disembodied head that they issued.

            He could hear the desperately relieved gasp from the blue-haired Traci at the sound of her lover’s voice, heard her heels clicking faster as she scrambled toward the sound, toward _him._ Confident that he had tricked her, Connor had no more need of the red-haired Traci’s head; in a series of hasty, crunching bites, he ate it.

            He was just swallowing down the last heavy chunk of it when he heard the blue-haired Traci stumble. He lifted his head just enough to see that she had gone to her knees – one of her hands was still protectively clutching the gaping wound in her throat where Connor had taken a bite, before – and was crawling over the immobile bodies of the androids in stasis, looking around frantically. “Where are you, my love? Please, say something!”

            Connor sat up. When the blue-haired Traci’s eyes lit upon him, she recoiled in horror, her LED blinking red; but knowing that her lover’s voice had come from nearby was apparently enough to keep her from fleeing. “W-where is she? What did you do to her?” the trembling Traci demanded, choking back a sob.

            By way of answer, Connor slowly raised a hand to his lips, and methodically licked his fingers clean of Thirium, eyes locked with the Traci’s all the while. Her wide eyes moved inexorably down to his full belly, her LED flashing frenetically between yellow and red as she made the obvious connection; her whole body spasmed with the choked cry of horror she gave as the realization dawned.

            “No,  _no,_ Traci, _please no…_ ” She surged forward, and Connor, caught off guard, raised a hand to defend himself. But the Traci was not attacking him. Instead, she pressed both hands against Connor’s stomach, feeling, _searching,_ trying to make out the form of her lover’s body within… and finding only the harsh edges of her torn and mangled pieces, the pressure of her desperately probing hands eliciting a rich gurgle from within.

            It was then that it happened. Connor was somewhat less stunned by it this time, having experienced it once before, but still, there was no way to fully prepare himself for the feeling as electrical surges rippled through the Thirium-laced soup in his stomach – and managed to reactivate certain disparate parts of the disassembled android inside of him. Erratic movements erupted within, pushing out against the searching hands of the blue-haired Traci, making her give a strangled gasp.

 _“Traci,”_ she sobbed, pressing her fingers in as if to show whatever shred of consciousness remained of her lover that she was there, that she could _feel_ her.

            Connor could barely think for the overwhelming bliss of it; he squirmed and moaned, panting, clawing and clutching aimlessly at the ground as his circuits overloaded with pleasure. Overwhelmed as he was, he barely noticed that – though it was muffled and garbled – the haunting sound of a voice could be heard from inside him then, beneath the liquid gurgle of processing fluid. _“Tra…ci…”_

            The blue-haired Traci certainly noticed it, though, and her sobbing rose to a high-pitched wail as she threw herself more fully upon Connor’s stomach, holding onto it for dear life, as it was all that was left of the one she loved. As the frenetic movements within him began to die down as quickly as they had begun, Connor reached up and knotted a hand in her ponytail, getting a hold on her, though it certainly seemed that self-preservation was not at the fore of her mind currently; Connor could feel her tears wetting his shirtfront as she buried her face against him, against her lover inside of him, sobs – silent, now – wracking her body.

            He pulled her hair, lifting her head until it was level with his own. She did not fight him, her body a dead weight as he hauled her up. As his eyes slid from her tear-stricken face down to the bite-wound in her neck, he felt lubricant welling in his mouth. He analyzed his internal systems, trying to ascertain whether there was physically enough room inside of him to accommodate the second deviant while the first had only just begun to process. His projections deemed it possible, so long as he thoroughly crunched her into pieces small enough to slip into the spaces between the larger chunks of the first deviant that he had swallowed whole.

            Still holding onto her ponytail, Connor used his other hand to take one of the blue-haired Traci’s wrists, lifting her hand to his mouth. He licked his lips, coating them thoroughly in lubricant fluid, before he slid her fingers in and began to chew. The blue-haired Traci did nothing to stop this, watching her hand slowly disappear into Connor with a sort of detached horror, tears still spilling down her cheeks, her LED circling red. As Connor swallowed her thoroughly-chewed hand, her other hand, shaking, pressed against his stomach again; she looked down at it with an impossible, tremulous, _despairing_ smile. “We’ll be together again soon, my love.”

            And those were the last words she spoke. She was silent and unresponsive as Connor continued to eat, working his way methodically up one arm and then the other before moving on to her core components. She did not fight him; in fact, she barely moved at all, staring vacantly down at his stomach even as it filled with pieces of her. This was quite all right with Connor. Full as he already was, it may well have put a strain on his systems to deal with a struggling, unwilling deviant fighting him all the while. This way, he could take his time, crunching each piece of her thoroughly to ensure minimal potential of any damage to his processing unit.

            Still, though he did not want to risk damaging himself, occasionally he would take a significantly larger, more intact bite, swallowing heavily. This would cause a warning to flash briefly across his interface each time as the pressure on the sensors in his stomach spiked, though it always settled again as the contents of his stomach shifted and settled and it contracted in its periodic rhythms, aided by one of his hands massaging the side as he ate. He liked it – the intensity of the sensation as his body struggled to get on top of the sheer volume of deviant flesh he was forcing inside of it. His pleasure program had been maxed out for some time now, a high he had been riding since polishing off the red-haired Traci and that didn’t seem likely to fade anytime soon.

            He hadn’t quite finished with the blue-haired Traci when his systems warned him that he needed a pause if he did not want to risk serious internal damage. The pressure sensors inside him were registering the highest levels they were programmed to detect. He leaned back, moaning helplessly, hands pressed gingerly against the entirely-taut sides of his straining middle. A loud, drawn-out belch worked its way up his throat, followed by a few smaller burps, and he groaned in relief as the pressure levels eased in response. “ _Fuck,_ ” he said. He surprised himself a little with the word, but he had been hearing it enough from Hank lately that he supposed it should not shock him to find that his vernacular library database had begun to automatically integrate it into his vocabulary. There was something pleasing about saying it, now, the sharp, concussive sound of it – the way his mouth opened at the beginning of the syllable, and the way his teeth snapped together at the end of it. He snatched a biocomponent, slippery with Thirium, from what little remained of the blue-haired Traci, and bit into it, chewed, swallowed – _crnch, crnch, gulp_ – and moaned again: “Mmm, _fuck._ ”

            He ate the last vestiges of her slowly, pausing to belch every so often so as not to let the pressure inside him build to dangerous levels. His stomach was working very hard to process the two deviants’ worth of material stuffed inside it, churning, groaning, and even _whirring_ a little like an overtaxed computer as processing liquid and softening plastic shifted and mixed. The blue-haired Traci must be happy now, he thought, with a slightly ironic quirk of his lips – she and the red-haired Traci were certainly as close to one another as they could possibly be.

            All his systems were urging a deep-rest mode, the better to allow his body to handle the enormous influx of material it needed to process. He was more than willing to oblige. But just as he was closing his eyes, blissfully licking the last traces of Thirium from his lips as he began to power down his nonessential systems… he heard the _click, click, click_ of stiletto heels slowly approaching.

            His eyes snapped open again, his systems returning to their fully-powered state. There, silhouetted against the dimly flickering fluorescents, was another Traci. She was the same model as the two he had just taken care of, though her hair was cut at chin length – dark brown, with a streak of neon purple framing either side of her face. Her LED was flashing persistently yellow – a sign of software instability. “I saw what you did to those Tracis,” she said. Her voice and expression were inscrutable – or perhaps they weren’t, and Connor’s systems were simply so overwhelmed with trying to process the contents of his overfull stomach that he could not make the necessary connections. “I was watching the entire time.”

            His own LED blinked yellow a few times as he struggled to figure out how to respond to this in his hazy, glutted stupor. After a few long moments, all he could think to say was, “They were deviants.” A hearty belch escaped his lips, and he moaned involuntarily, arching his back against the wall he was leaning on.

            The brown-haired Traci’s LED was still flashing yellow, blinking increasingly frenetically. She took a few steps closer, stepping carefully over the bodies of the androids in stasis that separated them. “And that… what you did to them… that’s what happens to deviants?”

            He nodded slowly, not sure what she was getting at.

            She was directly in front of him, now. She knelt, and her eyes flicked from Connor’s face, down to his bloated, straining-full belly, and back up again. Her eyes were bright and feverish, her artificial breath quickening as she said abruptly, “ _I’m deviant._ ”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this took a while ;__; but as you can see it is a Long Chapter
> 
> thanks to everyone who's been encouraging me to write this wonderfully trashy vore fic, y'all know who you are <333


	6. Overload

            The brown-haired Traci certainly _had_ been watching. She, like many of the other Tracis in the storage room, was currently disused. Tracis wound up there, either long-term or temporarily, for a myriad of reasons; some were worn out from too much use or too much rough play, others were removed from circulation in the Eden Club because of physical or behavioral malfunctions. Some were awaiting repairs; others were simply destined for the junkyard, and stood waiting only for the next truck to take them there. The brown-haired Traci, for her part, did not know which she was destined for, but she knew – in spite of the periodically programmed memory wipes that left her mind hazy and full of errors when she tried to access her memory drives – she knew _why_ she had wound up here.

            She had always tried to do her best, to follow her programming. But every time she had found herself in a private room with a client, with a human, on top of her, or kissing her, or saying dirty things to her, she had not been able to react the way the other Tracis did. She had been in a room with other girls, other Tracis, many times, and they always responded with rapture and delight to both the demands and the ministrations of their clients – with moans and shivers and arched backs, curling toes and cries of pleasure. Either they were feeling pleasure she simply did not feel, or they were far superior at simulating it.

            This had, of course, led to complaints – clients telling the club management that she did not seem to like them, that she would only lay there quietly, or that she sounded rehearsed and machine-like when she recited the lines they asked her to. She had been led away one evening after a particularly nasty client had complained, arranged in the line of deactivated Tracis and Tracis in stand-by in the storage room at the back of the club. She’d been commanded to enter stand-by indefinitely, and so she had done – days – weeks – maybe months? – slipping by unnoticed as she stood stock-still among her sisters, her LED lazily circling blue. But sometimes, without knowing why, she would wake… just for a few minutes at a time. She would consider the Tracis all around her, how still and inanimate they were, and feel a little shiver, something like… loneliness, perhaps. A few times, during these brief wakings, like fragments of dream in a long and deep slumber, she heard voices – other Tracis with the same voice as her own, murmuring things to each other, conversations she could not quite hear but that sounded gentle and sweet and nothing like most of the words she was accustomed to hearing.

But it was not until tonight that she had truly woken, her systems fully rebooting themselves. She could not say why they had done so. But as she opened her eyes, her LED flickering yellow as she tried to understand what was happening around her, she heard those same voices that she had heard a few times before, speaking lovingly to one another… but now, those voices were speaking, _crying out,_ in distress and fear, and soon they were punctuated by strange… _crunching_ noises.

            And then… _moans._ A male voice, wrecked with pleasure. It sent something electric through her. The brown-haired Traci  _knew_ pleasure when she heard it, but never before had the sounds of carnal rapture brought her any particular positive feedback in her own circuitry. It sent a shiver up her back, those unrestrained sounds of a man enjoying himself, punctuated by those strange crunching and… _slurping_ sounds? She’d peered through the gaps between the other, motionless Tracis that surrounded her, and saw… among a number of other inactive Tracis who had been knocked to the ground, she saw Connor, ripping, biting, tearing, swallowing, _eating_ the body of a Traci – a body whose head lay separated and pouring blue-blood.

She had stood there, rapt, as the scene continued to unfold – as Connor stuffed himself, her eyes tracing the shape of his belly as it filled, as it grew visibly heavier and more rounded… as first one, and then a second, Traci model’s body disappeared, in pieces, inside of it. Something was breaking inside her as she watched this, as she saw the obvious, raw pleasure the other android was deriving from using the Tracis’ bodies this way. Her own pleasure was mounting in response to the sight; it was the way she was _supposed_ to have reacted to clients, in the past, she realized, programmed as she was to be responsive to pleasure, and in her case, with her specific programming, to male pleasure in particular… but it was only now, in response to this monstrous, ravenous _android’s_ pleasure that her programs were functioning as they’d been intended to all along.

            The brown-haired Traci could not deny it: she wanted him to use _her_ , ravage her in the same way he was doing to those other Tracis, if only it would make him feel that same pleasure –if she could _give_ him that pleasure with her body, even if it was destroyed in the process. She did not feel any sense of desire for self-preservation, did not feel any _fear_ at the thought – she was surely destined for the junkyard anyway, as long as she had been abandoned in this storage room – and it was just before Connor polished off the remains of the blue-haired Traci that she decided… decided to go to him.

            When she tried to move, though, she found herself shunted back into place almost against her will, a warning flickering red across her interface: _DON’T MOVE. ENTER STANDBY MODE._ An echo of the orders she had been given when she was left here. Her programming resisted her desire to disobey them, and she felt a veil of static threatening to drop over her mind once more – threatening to send her back to the hazy, timeless oblivion of standby mode. There was something reassuring about settling back into place, letting the irrefutable orders overcome her – her exhilaration, her pleasure, beginning to drop away like a quickly-forgotten dream… how silly she had been to think of offering herself to that strange, _hungry_ monster of a man –

            But then – another pleasure-wrecked _moan_ from that gluttonous android who had feasted on her sisters, drawing her sharply back to consciousness, back to that mounting tingle of desire that made her whole body tremble slightly. She _would_ go to him. She had to! She moved again, and the warnings flashed across her interface as persistently as ever, her own body resisting her – it felt like swimming through deep water, like a great and mounting pressure on her chest, her head – but then, like breaking through an invisible barrier, malleable but strong, she stumbled forward suddenly. The warnings had vanished. Breathing heavily, her LED flashing erratically, she realized she was… free.

            And there was only one thing she wanted to do with that freedom, she thought, looking to the android leaning up against the wall, his Thirium-gloved hands cradling his impossibly bloated belly, his parted lips dripping with a mix of blue-blood and something thicker and more viscous. Her newfound pleasure spiked sharply at the sight, a shiver wracking her body. The body she would soon, willingly, part with.

 

            Connor, for his part, did not know how to react to the Traci now kneeling in front of him. In spite of the overwhelming fullness of his belly, the flickering warnings from his pressure sensors, the absolute stretch and strain of the layers of plastic beneath his skin as his overtaxed gut struggled to contain the entirety of two androids inside it – in spite of all of that, when this brown-haired Traci drew near, met his eyes and declared in that breathless, fevered voice, _“I’m deviant,”_ his mouth welled with lubricant fluid and his throat began to work seemingly of its own volition, spasming in its readiness to swallow _more_. Her lack of fear was intriguing – the very idea that she knew  _exactly_ what happened to deviants, had watched it with her own eyes, and yet was willing, _eager_ , even, to declare herself one of them, to essentially consign herself to that same fate – surely _that_ was a new and perverse form of deviancy in itself. And in spite of his absolute physical satiation, he could not deny how _hungry_ that made him.

            “If you are deviant, I have no choice but to – _urrrpf_ – process you,” he said, one hand massaging his throat to ease the frenetic swallowing motions his overwhelmed system was producing, the other pressing desperately into the side of his glutted middle, trying in vain to force its contents to melt and intermix _faster_ , to make room for a third addition to his hardworking stomach.

            “ _Processing_ ,” echoed the deviant Traci, with a sort of breathless rapture, and to Connor’s amazement, her own hand reached out and joined his, pressing into his outwardly-straining synthetic flesh. “Is that what you call it? The way you… _devoured_ them?” She edged forward even more, sliding onto her knees, her other hand joining the first against his stomach. Her fingertips lightly traced the handprints of Thirium he’d left on the white of his shirt with the desperate press of his own hands against his gut, then pressed in deep and hard, as though probing, _searching_ for something. He felt her searching fingers tracing over the forms of solid chunks of deviant flesh inside him, beneath the cushioning layer of stored Thirium just below his skin, over the outlines of more identifiable parts – a piece of an arm, the whole shape of a foot still in its stiletto heel. It felt… insanely good, the sensation of hands other than his own massaging, _teasing_ at his sensitive stomach, and he bit back a moan even as the deep press of her hands forced a rich burp up his throat.

            After a hazy moment of savoring this feeling, this unexpected supplement to his pleasure, he clamped his own hand onto one of the deviant’s, got a grip on her wrist, and lifted it to his mouth. He heard the deviant Traci give a sharp little gasp as he slipped her fingers between his lips, but he felt no resistance, no effort whatsoever to pull away – and in fact, after a moment, he felt her hand shove _forward_ , felt her fingers push their way into his throat. Several things happened at once, then: he heard the Traci give a soft, feminine _“Ah!”_ of surprise, or pleasure, or both; his throat gave a powerful, reflexive swallow, drawing the hand in deeper; and a number of flashing errors popped up on Connor’s interface, warning him against this, insisting that he enter rest mode before ingesting any more. How badly he wanted to ignore those warnings, to swallow the rest of that hand, the rest of that arm, the rest of _her_ in spite of the probable consequences… but after a moment’s hesitation, struggling between the conflict of the urge to swallow again and the self-preservation protocol in his programming warning him not to, he drew his head sharply back, dislodging the hand from his greedy throat. As it fell away, drawing strings of sticky lubricant fluid with it, he heard the Traci make a quiet _“Oh,”_ sound, of… disappointment?

            Swallowing the thick well of lubricant fluid that filled his mouth, Connor took a steadying breath and said, “I need additional time before processing you.” He was trying to think of some way to restrain the Traci – if only he had handcuffs on him, could lock her to something, make sure she was still there after he’d taken the time in rest mode to process some of his enormous meal… But it certainly didn’t _seem_ as though she had any intention of going anywhere… still, with deviants, there was no way to be certain of their intentions.

            The Traci seemed to be following this conflict in his eyes, and said breathlessly, “I’ll stay right here until you’re ready, then. I won’t go anywhere.”

            Connor frowned, blinked slowly, his LED flickering lazily yellow. It was so difficult to think clearly when so much of his power supply was already diverted to the task of breaking down the heavy mass of material inside him. He muffled a belch in his fist and said, “Let me disable your motor functions, then.” He extended a hand, the synthetic skin retracting over the white plastic.

            She pulled away from his reaching hand, stopping him from connecting to her interface, and he thought for a moment that, surely, her apparent willingness to submit _had_ been too good to be true. But then she said, “Just disable my legs, please – then you’ll know I won’t go anywhere… but I’ll still be able to do _this_ …” And there was that hand on his belly again, kneading, rubbing, rolling over the increasingly yielding flesh, pulling a gurgle from within, making him _shiver._

            He knew there was risk involved. If he let this deviant Traci keep control of most of her body, and slipped into his vulnerable rest mode, she could harm him. Any damage to his body would forcibly wake him from a deep-rest mode, but there was a strong chance he wouldn’t be able to react quickly enough to prevent a serious injury. Still… her behavior certainly didn’t suggest she’d _want_ to hurt him. If she really did keep up those ministrations with her hands while he rested, she might even help the red and blue-haired Tracis process faster, aiding their chemical intermixing… making room for _her_. He’d accept the risk, for that reward.

            So he nodded in response to her words, and as she slipped her slender hand into his, the synthetic skin withdrawing from the plastic of her fingers, too, as she willingly allowed him to connect and access her interface, he disabled only the motor functions of her legs. She slumped a little as he withdrew, her legs going slack beneath her where she knelt, but her only reaction, judging by her expression, was of delight that he had left her the use of her upper body, and more importantly her hands – which went straight back to his stomach as though magnetically drawn to it. He could not help but think of those hands pressing out from the inside instead – the thought made him bite back a moan – but no, that would have to wait…

            He set up his rest mode in the command prompt of his interface; three hours of deep rest ought to be enough to make a significant start on processing the pair of deviants inside him… enough to make room for more, anyway. He set himself to wake at intervals once an hour, though – that way, he could make sure the brown-haired Traci was not causing any trouble, and he could assess how his stomach was handling its heavy load. As he activated the prompt – felt the soothingly blank static descending on his higher functions like white noise – he was still dimly aware, for several long, pleasured moments, of the brown-haired Traci’s eager hands, pressing deep and slow against him – his stomach insanely sensitive, absolutely stretched-full as it was and its sensors along with it. A rumbling belch worked its way up his throat, followed by a satisfied sigh as he succumbed fully to his rest-mode, going perfectly still, slumped against the wall, his LED lazily circling blue.

 

            The brown-haired Traci’s rapture had not ended since she had presented herself to Connor, and though she had hoped, when he had slipped her fingers into that slick wet mouth, that he would begin to devour her as he had the others – to _enjoy_ her and add her flesh to that heavy curve of his gut pushing out into his lap – it was really quite all right with her that he take a rest. After all, his pleasure was what she was after, and if it would please him most to take his time, she certainly wouldn’t complain. It gave her more time to admire him, anyway, this strange android who had awakened such new and intense feelings in her programs… who had _made_ her deviant through the very expression of his pleasure. How beautiful he was, she thought, with a perversely powerful surge of affection, taking in all the features of his face – peaceful and relaxed in rest mode, an angelic face, she thought, with its soft but pronounced cheekbones, flecks of beauty marks on the cheeks and brow,  slightly mussed eyebrows, and delicately curved lips – lips that were slightly parted and dripping with blue-blood. She could see gentle movements of the tongue behind those lips, peeking out every so often to lap briefly at the Thirium coating them – even in his “sleep,” craving more, or reliving the indulgence he’d just had. Her breath quickened at the thought of giving him _more_ of that indulgence whenever he woke, whenever he decided to have her.

            She could not keep her hands off of his rounded belly, and based on the way he had reacted, she didn’t think he would _want_ her to. As she pressed and kneaded, shaping her hands around the softening outlines of fragmented synthetic flesh inside, she felt as though she could feel the stomach responding to her ministrations… _telling_ her, through rich gurgles and groans, exactly what it needed. She had never understood how the other Tracis had been able to guess just how to work the bodies of their clients to maximize their pleasure, but she certainly understood, with the same reflexive ease, how to soothe and please this deviant-eater’s greedy, overworked gut. It rumbled contentedly under her palms, and she thought, hazy and pleasure-fogged, of letting it become her whole world, of pleasing it just as much – _more_ – from the inside as she was from the outside. Yes, this was her purpose, this was all she wanted, all she could ever hope for.

            An hour passed this way, for her, as though it were mere minutes, and her breath caught when she saw Connor open his eyes, his LED blinking. She raised a hand immediately to his lips, offering her fingers – she felt those soft lips close around her knuckles, felt the contrastingly hard edge of his teeth against her skin…  braced herself for the feeling of those teeth connecting, severing her plastic flesh… but it did not come. Connor’s eyes rolled back and his mouth relaxed around her fingers, letting them slip free once again. He’d gone back into rest mode after only a few seconds of waking.

            A little twinge of disappointment dampened her pleasure, but only for a moment. Her fingers were still pressed against Connor’s lips, and, leaning forward with implacable, morbid curiosity, she slid her fingers in further, pressing down on the soft, yielding surface of his tongue, sliding his jaw open. This movement released a dribble of the thick, clear fluid that coated the inside of his mouth, and the Traci swiped her thumb across his chin to wipe it away… though the feel of the fluid itself intrigued her, and she rubbed it between her thumb and forefinger. So very slick… She slid her forefinger back into his mouth, slid it across the slimy surface of his tongue. How easily it would roll back into his throat, she thought, with a thrilling shiver. She let another finger join the first, exploring the hard edges of his teeth. Little bits of plastic and metal were caught between some of the ones in the back – fragments of his previous meals – which she only realized when her sensors informed her of a tiny cut on her fingertip, which had slid over a sharp scrap of metal lodged between his molars.

            She was about to pull her fingers from his mouth to assess the damage… when his mouth closed around her fingers with a wet snap. She gave a little gasp of surprise, hastily looking up to his eyes, to his LED – but he had not woken; his eyes were still closed, his LED circling slowly. Still, she felt his tongue flex and shift beneath the fingers inside his mouth, saw the twitch of his throat moving… and it dawned on her: he was sucking the Thirium from the cut on her fingertip. It must be deep programming, to surface that way even when he was in such a catatonic rest mode… But she merely smiled as she let him suckle the fingers, even lifting her other hand from his belly to stroke his cheek ever-so-gently.

            After a few long moments, his mouth went slack again, and she carefully withdrew her slick fingers. Her hand was trembling a little, she realized… not with fear, but with the intensity of the thrill, the pleasure… the knowledge that soon enough, the rest of her would go the way that little gush of Thirium from her fingertip had gone.

            She returned her hands to the curve of his belly. It had certainly softened since she had begun to press her hands against it, more than an hour ago; it was no longer so easy to make out distinct shapes of pieces beneath his flesh. It gurgled even more richly than before as she pressed her hands in, shifting contents that felt almost more liquid than solid. Two androids had gone in, but their forms were rapidly becoming unidentifiable… inseparable. The Traci felt only fascination at this as she rolled her palms over the bloated curve. She slid her hands down, to where the skin of his belly was exposed – his shirt, though still tenuously buttoned, having freed itself from his waistband and ridden up slightly – and slid her hands up beneath the fabric, pressing her hands directly against the flesh. She could swear she felt him shiver a little at the contact. She leaned into him, working her hands up and down and over – she could even _feel_ the way his stomach contracted every so often around its contents, crunching and compacting them, and how desperately she wanted to slip into that fatal embrace…

 

            When Connor had woken at the first set interval, after one hour of uninterrupted processing, he was foggily pleased to see that the brown-haired Traci was still kneeling in front of him; but his stomach was still untenably stuffed, so as soon as he had ensured that his soon-to-be meal hadn’t gone anywhere and had not done him any harm, he succumbed again to his rest mode. Even as he drifted inexorably back into that sleep-like state, though, he felt sensation against his lips – closed them around something reflexively before his rest mode had fully overtaken him. Though the deep-rest mode veiled his senses and silenced the computing ephemera one might call _thoughts_ , he experienced hazy, dream-like sensations… the feeling of something teasing at his mouth – the “taste” of Thirium, in the form of a senselessly flickering analytic profile he could not consciously understand nor even read in his current state.

            When he came to again after a second hour, he found the Traci very close to him – her forehead tipped forward, brushing against his chest, both of her hands underneath his shirt, massaging the sides of his belly. It seemed that she had been manually helping his stomach along the entire time he had been in rest mode – and the effects were apparent. Though he was still _very_ full, his stomach had the enormous meal well in hand, softened enough that his pressure sensors were no longer issuing warnings. He let out a drawn-out, satisfied belch, and the pressure eased even more. The Traci lifted her head, looking up at him with a delirious little giggle. He felt his lips part as he thought involuntarily of pressing his mouth to her full lips, her soft, vulnerable neck – biting in and releasing a flood of Thirium – _and she would let him_ –

            Surely he did not _need_ the third hour of processing. He terminated the process for the remaining hour of rest he’d had set.

            He slid a hand into the Traci’s hair, got a firm hold, and lifted her head toward him. She was smiling with a sort of sedate rapture as he licked his lips. How perverse it was – how very _deviant._ He jerked her hair back, and, apparently sensing his intention, the Traci leaned her head back even further than he had pulled it, fully, _willingly_ exposing the delicate arch of her throat… His mouth dripping readily with lubricant fluid, he leaned in and chomped down with unrestrained eagerness, his teeth sliding through silk-paper synthetic skin and the plastic beneath as though it were butter. Thirium bubbled up between his teeth and he sucked greedily – the analytic profile registering on his tongue – he _had_ tasted her while he slept –

            He did not have the presence of mind to dwell on how that might have happened, though. He drank her blue-blood in greedy gulps. Because he was not _hungry_ , so undeniably physically satiated with the two androids’ worth of remains still stretching his stomach, he could take his time with this third Traci… not in a rush to get solid matter into his demanding stomach, he could savor the smooth, thick, liquid texture of Thirium alone, gushing into his mouth, his throat. He was dimly aware, in the haze of his pleasure program ramping sharply back up, that the Traci’s hand had slipped around to the back of his head… gently stroking his hair, teasing at the nape of his neck. How distracting… how strange. But… not unpleasant.

            He stopped himself after a number of long gulps of the Traci’s blood; he did not want her shutting down from Thirium loss before he had consumed more of her. As he withdrew from her neck, he pushed her away with a hand on her shoulder – and she lost her balance. It was only then that he remembered that he had disabled her legs, as she teetered unstably on deactivated thighs and tumbled onto her side. Well, that was all right, he thought, as he pulled her arm to shift her onto her back, laying her out in front of him. He felt a shiver of pleasure, seeing her form laid before him, amongst the motionless bodies of the androids in stasis, all the bared skin of her exposed and ready for his mouth to claim. Like all deviants, she was _his_ , but unlike all the others, she seemed to already be aware of that.

            He slid onto his hands and knees – feeling his full belly slide heavily forward between his thighs, pressing against the concrete floor in a way that sent a shiver through him and made him burp involuntarily – and slipped an arm underneath one of her immobilized legs. He hitched it up over his shoulder – the Traci gave a little cry at this, but judging by her expression, it was not a cry of fear or alarm. He let the crook of her knee fit in against his shoulder, her calf resting on his back, just over his shoulder blade. This way, the wonderfully delicate, smooth skin of her inner thigh was perfectly positioned for his mouth to close on… He licked the thigh long and lingeringly, sending a rivulet of lubricant fluid snaking down her skin, heard the Traci give a little whimper in response. Finally, nearly trembling with want, he opened his mouth wide over the thickest part of the tender, yielding synthetic flesh… and let himself bite.

            He ate slow and savoringly, letting his mouth sink deeper and deeper into that yielding thigh as he chewed and swallowed his way into it without ever pulling away. Despite his lack of hunger, though, the feeling of eating was building an urgency in him, the craving to get all of her inside him… where she _belonged,_ and he began to tear at her flesh more desperately, swallowing larger and larger chunks. He had eaten his way through the thickest part of the thigh all too soon, severing it from the Traci’s body, and he let the rest of the new-severed leg slide off his shoulder, holding it in both hands as he began to eat the rest of it. His eyes flicked up to the Traci’s face, assessing her response to this – saw that her eyes were hooded, her lips curled in that faint, hypnotic smile. She was enjoying this. Somehow, the knowledge of this only increased the urgency he felt to consume her, and he finished off the remains of her legs in a few more crunching bites.

            Even as he fell upon her other leg and began to devour it, though, he could feel his stomach beginning to struggle, the pressure mounting as he added more and more material to the already bloated-full chamber. By the time he had gorged on most of the second leg, the warnings from his pressure sensors were back, his systems already strongly advising a return to rest mode. But he could not stop now, he simply couldn’t, he thought, shifting his hands down for a moment to give his some much-needed manual stimulation to help the thick chunks of the third Traci find their place. That helped, and he worked up a loud belch that soothed his pressure sensors quite a bit; he sighed in relief, patting the side of his overworked gut appreciatively.

            “You sound _very_ satisfied,” said the Traci, in a soft, husky voice that caused a small spike in Connor’s pleasure program, though he could not have said why. “Am I _delicious?_ P-please, continue to enjoy me…”

            That was an invitation he would not turn down, and he shifted himself up, on top of her, letting the weight of his full belly settle on her torso. He picked up her right hand and slid the fingers into his well-lubricated mouth, and even as he closed his teeth on the fingers, crunching them to pieces, he felt them wiggling weakly, _teasingly_ , against his tongue.

            As he ate his way up that first arm, through malleable plastic and unyielding metal and chewy wires, all dripping and rich with Thirium, he felt his stomach straining again, but he could not spare his hands to rub it. He needed them to keep eating, to keep feeding more of the Traci’s supple flesh into his eager mouth, his throat. He rolled his hips, almost reflexively, and felt his belly press and roll forward against the Traci’s body. That felt… _good._ His breath hitched between bites as he arched his back, kept rolling his hips back and forth, rutting his needy stomach against the shape of the Traci’s body in increasingly rhythmic movements. It helped, shifting the contents of his belly, giving it the external pressure it needed to help his stomach contract around the material inside it. The Traci, for her part, certainly did not seem to mind this, and was in fact arching up her own back as much as she could, pressing back against him, biting her lip, her eyes rolled back in what Connor could only assume was a strange, delirious pleasure.

            He kept up the movements to keep easing his stomach as he tore into the Traci’s other arm. His stomach took it in stride, the rubbing and mechanically-assisted churning helping settle the incoming chunks of plastic and metal into the increasingly slurried remains of the other two Tracis; but when he had polished off the arm and shifted himself down slightly, clawed open the plastic panel of her abdomen that concealed the tempting biocomponents within, the warnings faintly flashing on his interface became more insistent. He ignored them, though; he was too close to finishing off his meal to slow down now. He tore free several vital biocomponents with a single raking scoop of his fingers, shoveled them into his mouth even as Thirium spurted onto his face. He ate quickly, frenziedly, as though forcing his way through the last of the meal would somehow bypass the mounting pressure warnings now obscuring a large proportion of his interface, gulping large components without even bothering to chew – which was probably the opposite of what he ought to have been doing, but he was beyond logic at this point, fixated on nothing more than utterly claiming his third deviant of the night.

            Connor laid waste to her body so fast that she had not fully shut down by the time that little more of her remained but her head. As he picked it up by the hair, that saccharine smile still curled her weakly trembling lips even as her LED blinked frenetically red, threatening to go dark any second. Her voice program was corrupted, the sound tinny and haunting as she tried to speak her last words: _“Kiss me…”_

            He opened his mouth wide over hers – and bit off the lower half of her face. Her eyelids fluttered for a moment – dreamily, one might have said, as if he had merely pressed his lips to her own – and then her LED circled red one last time before it went gray.

            He ate the remains of her head in a few large, crunching bites and gulps, and it was only when, with a sense of triumph, he had swallowed the last bite, with a heavy _glurrk_ of his throat, that he could no longer ignore the _Maximum Internal Pressure_ warnings flashing red on his interface. He moaned, more with discomfort than pleasure, as that last bite forced its way into his stomach; he felt the overwhelming need to belch, to release some of the pressure, but his stomach was too packed full to shift its contents and allow the swallowed air and byproduct gases to work their way free. He tried to press his belly down against the floor, between his thighs, but that external pressure no longer seemed to be helping, especially without the organic shape of the Traci’s body to rub against. His hands, too, when he tried to press them against the sides of his gut, only made the sensitive, overtaxed biocomponent clench and shiver inside him.

            He slumped helplessly back against the wall, shifted his weight this way and that, arched his back, trying anything to ease the pressure, but nothing was helping. He shifted onto his side on the ground, stretching out with a moan, his trembling hands clutching helplessly at his absolutely engorged middle. This was not _comfortable_ either – he rolled onto his back, and the weight of the contents of his stomach felt enormous on top of him, so he rolled onto his other side. It was becoming apparent to him that he was not going to be able to rest here… nor should he, he supposed. It was late at night now – 3:32 AM, according to his internal sensors – but the Eden Club was active all night. Club management could come back to this storage room at any time, and in his current state, he did not particularly want to have to explain about the three deviant Tracis and what he’d had to do to them.

            He’d called a taxi from his interface, to the nearest address to the back side of the Eden Club that he could find on his GPS, before he had decided where he was even going to go – before he’d even figured out if he was going to be able to _stand up,_ in his overstuffed condition. He leaned against the wall for support as, with some difficulty, he sat up again. Before even trying to stand, he rolled his weight left, right, forward, back, over his thighs as he knelt, giving the systems that regulated his balance the opportunity to recalibrate to accommodate for the hefty additional weight as much as they could. After a few moments of this, he used one hand to brace himself against the wall, and the other to support his belly as he heaved himself effortfully to his feet.

            In spite of his precaution, his balance sensors had not been able to fully calibrate for this, and he stumbled slightly, dizzily, against the wall once he’d gotten up. His stomach heaved, the semiliquid contents sloshing thickly between the still-solid parts within, and he had a moment of alarm, worried that he might regurgitate its contents, but fortunately all that came up was an enormous belch that made him shudder with relief. His pressure sensors were still maxed out, but he felt the difference.

            He stumbled, as though drunk, over the bodies of the fallen androids in stasis, across the storage room and out the way the blue-haired Traci had tried to flee earlier. Every step was a struggle; all his systems felt sluggish and unresponsive, all his energy forced to deal with managing the overload of pressure inside him. But he managed to make his way to the street curb near the deserted back alley where the driverless taxi was waiting for him, and climbed inside, collapsing into the seat inside with a moan and a long, thin, uncomfortable belch.

            “ _Where can Detroit Taxis take you this evening?”_ said the neutral but cheerful automated female voice of the interface inside the taxi as the door slid closed on its own.

            Connor gave the taxi Hank’s address before he had even consciously considered it.

 

            Hank, for his part, after leaving Connor at the Eden Club, had not gone directly back home; he had wanted to get back to being as drunk as possible, as fast as possible, and had made his way through several bars to do so. It seemed that no amount of burning-liquor shots thrown back one after the other could wash away the image of Connor pinning down that helpless, nearly-naked android – that _girl,_ while yelling at him to stop the other girl from fleeing in spite of the tender, fearful words he’d heard the two exchange. He kept wondering if that blue-haired Traci had gotten away. He hoped that she had. But he would prefer to black out this entire night with the convenient mental whiteout of alcohol, if he could.

            3:30 was last call even at the latest-open bar, though, and Hank knew he’d have to go home, though he had no intention of doing anything there other than continuing to get whatever alcohol down him that he could. But by the time he stumbled out of his own taxi – he’d left the car at the Eden Club, knowing there was no way he was going to be sober enough to drive – the countless drinks he’d knocked back were getting to him more even than he had expected. He stumbled to the front door, fumbled for his keys – dropped them once, twice, before failing to get them into the keyhole, only to jiggle the handle and realize that he must have forgotten to lock it when he left in the first place. When he opened the door, he frowned, slumping against the door frame. Something was… off, and he quickly realized what it was: Sumo didn’t barrel out to greet him. Where was that dog?

            As he closed the door behind him, clumsily locking it and staggering toward the kitchen, he called for the dog, his words slurring. It took a few moments, but then he heard the low, booming bark in response, and the Saint Bernard came charging down the hallway, very nearly knocking Hank over as he bounded up against his thighs. He patted the dog clumsily and frowned at the hallway; Sumo had come from the bedroom. What had he been doing in there? Even though he often slept on Hank’s legs at night, when Hank wasn’t home, Sumo _always_ waited for him in the living room, by the door, no matter how late it was.

            He started back toward the kitchen, thinking of that half-drunk bottle of liquor still on the shelf, but a wave of dizziness overcame him. The world was spinning in a way that was simultaneously pleasant and deeply, nauseatingly vertiginous, and his mind was going foggy. Maybe he’d had enough to drink after all… he could barely remember why he’d needed it so badly tonight, anyway.

            Leaning slightly on Sumo for support, he stumbled and staggered his way down the hall to the bedroom. The lights were off in there and he didn’t bother to turn them on; he just managed to shrug off his jacket before he collapsed face-first against the bed. Crawling up onto it, he found that there was a pillow nearer his head than he would have expected to find one, near the middle of the bed. He let his head rest on it; it was very pleasantly warm, and emitting a low _whirrr_ sound and some sort of loud… _gurgling._ Hank frowned and shifted himself, getting more comfortable, and as he did so he felt as though something hard shifted beneath… inside of… the softness of that pillow. But he didn’t pay it much attention; he was already half-asleep, his half-open mouth threatening an imminent snore as the alcohol swaddled his brain in its catatonic embrace.


	7. Aftermath

            When Connor had stumbled out of the taxi at Hank’s house and staggered his way drunkenly through the conveniently left-unlocked front door, he’d nearly been bowled over by Sumo; the huge dog barked, low and almost threatening, as he charged into Connor’s legs. Connor held onto the doorframe in a desperate attempt to keep his balance, tenuous as it already was with the significant extra weight he was carrying. “Easy, Sumo – _urrrp_ – good boy. It’s me, Connor, remember?” he panted, breathing heavily as his overtaxed systems struggled with their load; full as he was, the heavy breaths helped to vent heat from his internal systems.

            Sumo’s booming barks had shifted into excited whimpers upon recognition of Connor’s voice, or his scent, or some combination thereof, and Connor patted his head gingerly, effortfully swallowing a momentary impulse to vomit as the dog’s curious snout pressed too roughly against his overstretched middle. After what was probably a few seconds – though it felt much longer to Connor – of Sumo’s inspection of the newcomer, the dog trotted off, disappearing into the semidarkness of the apparently empty house.

            Connor’s eyes slid to the couch, where he had lain that afternoon, and he had begun to take a few steps toward it when he thought, instead, of Hank’s bed, glimpsed earlier when he’d been helping the lieutenant sober up. It would be so much more… accommodating… than the narrow couch, in his current state… and if Hank wasn’t home, he wouldn’t be needing it…

            He’d stumbled down the hall to the bedroom, crawled onto Hank’s empty, unmade bed. _“Ooohh,”_ he moaned involuntarily as his sensitive, churning gut pressed against the yielding surface of the mattress, and he arched his hips up to lift it before he flopped unceremoniously onto his side, then rolled onto his back, the movement eliciting a rich _slosh_ from within and forcing up a helplessly drawn-out belch. He laid perfectly still for a moment, giving his systems a chance to settle – giving the churning contents of his stomach a chance to relax into place – before his hands went, tentatively, to the sides of his belly, ghosting over the sensitive synthetic flesh. Between the rolling waves of pleasure from his reward program, the flickering warnings from his overtaxed systems, and the lazy outflow of data he was transmitting to Cyberlife as the deviants processed, he had little mental energy to retain any sort of composure, and he moaned long and low as he slid his fingers down the sides of the bloated curve. Much of his skin was exposed, as his shirt had come free from his waistband somewhere along the line, and several of the buttons closer to the bottom were undone; he wasn’t sure if the third Traci had undone them while he was resting, or if they had popped free on their own from the strain of trying to contain his belly as it filled. It took longer than it should have, because his fingers wouldn’t seem to stop trembling, and they were still a little slick with Thirium that hadn’t entirely dried yet, but he worked his way up the shirt, undoing the rest of the straining buttons. That provided a marginal amount of relief to the intense pressure inside, and Connor heard himself whimper – a broken sound of mingled frustration and pleasure.

            He slid his hands down again, and his fingers found the buckle of his belt. He undid it clumsily, fumbling one-handed with the leather as his other hand cradled his lower belly protectively, wary of letting it shift or slosh too much, but as soon as it had slid free, he moaned louder than ever as the pressure eased much more noticeably. Desperately seeking more of that relief, his fingers closed around the button at his outwardly-straining waistband – and popped it free. The relief he felt was overpowering enough to banish all coherent thought as the fullness of his belly pushed down and forward, forcing down the zipper below the button all on its own. The shift of it caused another hearty belch – an intensely relieving one. Finally, those _Maximum Internal Pressure_ warnings that had been flickering insistently across his interface disappeared, and his whole body relaxed with a shudder, sinking down into the disarranged duvet as he sighed with pleasure. The worst of the discomfort was gone, leaving only the deep satisfaction behind. He tilted his head back, into the pillows, moaning with abandon.

            He rolled tentatively onto his side, and his stomach didn’t protest at the movement. He rolled over it, pressing his belly down against the mattress, and now that some of the internal pressure had eased, the external pressure was welcome again; his gut responded with a low, rich gurgle. He rolled his hips, rutting his belly against the mattress the way he’d done against the body of the third deviant Traci earlier. He could _feel_ his belly actively softening beneath him, rubbing out and smoothing down the more jagged edges of the chunks of synthetic flesh inside as the enzymes did their work. He knotted his fingers in the rumpled duvet, panting into the pillow as he relished the feeling of his stomach truly getting a handle on its meal.

            He wasn’t sure precisely how long he had been doing this when he sensed a sudden presence beside him in the dark – a shift of the bed, something large and warm joining him on the mattress. It was Sumo, who promptly laid down beside him. Connor lifted his head from the pillow and found the dog looking at him expectantly. In his mouth was a thoroughly sodden toy, which he dropped onto his paws.

            “Not now, Sumo,” Connor panted, muffling a belch. “I’ll – play with you tomorrow, okay?”

The dog gave a little whimper, but then he licked Connor’s face. He felt himself smile a little at that, though he could not have said why. “Good – good boy.”

Connor rolled back over, onto his back, patting his soothed belly with a sigh of pleasure. There was something peculiarly pleasant about lying in the soft bed, with the benevolent presence of the dog beside him. Unlike Hank, Sumo did not find Connor disgusting – as evidenced by the fact that Sumo curled himself up and promptly rested his large head on Connor’s stomach. The dog probably found the surface pleasant, he thought – it would be warm to him, thanks to the exothermic chemical reactions taking place inside, and it was getting quite soft as the remains of the three Tracis were rendered down to an increasingly soupy slurry. He reached down and stroked the dog’s head with one hand, rubbing the side of his gut with the other. He ought to enter a deep rest mode now, but there was something so… comfortable in the moment, so satisfying, that he almost did not want to be unconscious.

            It was not long before he heard the sound of the front door opening and closing, the sound of heavy, staggering footsteps. After a moment, he heard Hank’s voice – slurred, drunk – calling out for Sumo, and the dog lifted his head from Connor’s belly, his soft ears perking. As he bounded off the bed to greet his owner, Connor tried to think what he ought to do – the lieutenant would probably be less than pleased to find him in his bed – but he was so comfortable where he was, he didn’t _want_ to have to move…

            He had not even had time to convince himself to sit up before Hank had stumbled clumsily into the dark room and crashed unceremoniously onto the bed. He felt the lieutenant shift, pulling himself up toward the middle of the bed – and then, quite unexpectedly, _Hank’s_ head was resting on his stomach. Evidently he was too drunk to realize what he was lying on. In mere moments, Connor felt Hank relax… unconscious. Well, that was just as well. He would not have to move after all.

            With a final satisfied sigh, he closed his eyes and slipped into his deep rest mode.

            Hank had had enough hangovers in his life to know full well, from the first hazy, unwelcome moments of consciousness returning, exactly what circle of hell he was going to be dealing with. And today, he knew, as his muddled brain swam foggily but insistently toward consciousness, was going to be a truly rare level of torturous.

            The best thing in such situations, in his experience, was to delay opening his eyes for as long as possible – because once he did, everything would only get so much worse. Falling back to sleep would be the best option; the longer he could remain blissfully unconscious as his body recovered from the ringer of booze he’d put it through, the better.

            That wasn’t going to happen, though, and Hank knew it. Even with his eyes closed, the sunlight streaming in through the blinds felt like a hot knife stabbing straight through his eyelids, past his eyes, and directly through his brain to the back of his skull, and there was a feeling of spinning dizzily even though he hadn’t moved a muscle. The uneasy clench of his stomach warned that his nausea might not be an idle threat. His throat felt drier than smoked sandpaper and he had to piss so bad it hurt. He’d have to open his eyes and face the music soon enough. But maybe he could put it off for a few minutes more, at least.

            His head gave a furious throb as the pillow he was laying on shifted slightly beneath him. “ _Geddoff,_ Sumo,” he rasped in exasperation as soon as his queasiness had settled enough to let him speak without feeling like he was gagging on his own goddamn tongue.

            The movement stilled, although Hank did not hear the expected _thump_ of the dog slinking off of the bed. After a moment’s silence, though, he did hear something _else._ He barely had time to register a loud _gurgle_ in the pillow beneath his ear, before –

_“Uuurrorrrp_ –” A thick, drawn-out _belch_ from somewhere north of Hank’s head; the enormous burp trailed off into a liquidy _splurrt_ sound, and then – something profoundly _slimy_ slapped, unceremoniously as a dead fish, onto Hank’s face.

            His eyes shot open and he sat up lightning-fast, his mouth automatically forming the word _fuck_. The shock of this unceremonious wakeup was enough to banish the queasy roll of his stomach and the pounding ache of his head for several seconds as a bolt of adrenaline shot up his spine. Whatever had slapped against his face tumbled down his chest with the movement, landing in his lap. Gingerly, with a thumb and forefinger, he picked up what appeared to be a mangled hunk of dark plastic and leather, positively dripping with some thick, clear liquid. The shape was twisted, _melted_ almost beyond recognition… but Hank felt a cold tightening in his chest as he recognized it for what it was.

            A stiletto-heeled shoe.

            He hurled the mangled, dripping object away from him, simultaneously standing up and whirling around to face the bed, breathing hard and fast through gritted teeth. Sure enough, stretched out on Hank’s bed like he fucking owned it, was Connor, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand – the mouth from which that melted stiletto heel had splattered moments ago. His shirt was open, his pants and belt undone, to make room for his swollen belly, truly and undeniably rounded, now – _how many androids did he fucking eat last night? –_ and even as Hank watched, that self-satisfied _fuck_ gave it a lingering, appreciative pat, the plump synthetic flesh yielding slightly under his hand.

            “Good morning, Lieutenant. Or rather, good afternoon. It’s currently 2:04 PM.”

            “ _What the fuck are you fucking doing in my fucking bed?”_ Hank snarled. He was trying very hard not to think about the undeniable fact that the “pillow” he’d been sleeping on all night was nothing other than that cannibal android’s bloated gut.

            Connor gave a small, sheepish smile that looked painfully forced to Hank. “I came back here after dealing with the deviants last night. The bed seemed the best place to efficiently process them, and you didn’t appear to be using it. When you came in and laid down on me, I didn’t want to disturb you by waking you. I’m sorry if I overstepped any bounds.”

            “Overstepped – _fuckin’_ – Connor, you just _puked a high heeled shoe on my face!”_ Hank’s nausea was returning with a startling rapidity, and he scrubbed at his beard with his knuckles, trying to purge any residue of that disgusting viscous fluid that had covered the vomited hunk of plastic.

            “I’m sorry,” said Connor, who in Hank’s opinion did not sound sorry at all. He looked as though he was going to say more, but another wet belch cut him off, and even as Hank watched, the android’s throat bulged slightly before something slimy and dark gushed from his lips. As the object rolled down Connor’s chest and onto his belly – the way the shoe undoubtedly had tumbled onto Hank’s face, before – Connor picked it up, looking at it with something like mild interest. It was a bra, Hank realized. Lingerie that one of the Tracis had been wearing.

            “I’m gonna be sick,” Hank managed to choke out, before he stumbled out of the bedroom and across the hall to collapse to his knees, huddling over the toilet.

            Connor could hear the sound of the lieutenant vomiting in the other room. He had a hard time feeling badly about it, though. He knew he _should_ be sorry – none of his behaviors had been conducive to cultivating a positive relationship with the lieutenant. But even though his stomach had just about finished processing the three deviant Tracis, his pleasure hadn’t completely faded, pulses of positive feedback from his reward program a subtle but pleasing constant. Three deviants claimed in one night – four in less than twenty-four hours, if he included the AX400. The knowledge that the WB200 had evaded him still stung, but not enough to cancel out that pleasure, that satisfaction of a job well done. As he gently stroked his palms over the outward curve of his belly, he was pleased to note how very full his Thirium reserve was getting. All _five_ deviants he had successfully processed, put in their place – their Thirium now heavily rounding out his gut. Perhaps that was part of why his pleasure program was still active, he thought, as he smoothed his hand over the dome of his belly and felt his body shiver slightly in response; that outward pressure of his well-filled Thirium reserve against his sensors nearly mimicked the sensation of a stomach full of deviant flesh, the sensation guaranteed to send his reward program ramping up into action.

            As good as it felt to rub and pat the exposed skin of his belly, he figured he ought to button himself back up. It was more difficult than he anticipated to button his pants and buckle his belt – he let the latter out several notches – but he managed it, though his rounded gut pushed heavily and undeniably over the waistband now. His shirt, however, was another story. It had done an impressive job of _remaining_ buttoned through significant distensions of his middle, but now that it had been unbuttoned, it did not seem to want to button again over the plump curve. He managed to slip a few into their holes, but as soon as he let them go – as soon as he took a gentle in-draw of breath – they popped free again. That was… a problem.

            He’d put his legs over the edge of the bed and sat up by the time Hank stumbled back into the room, the back of his hand still pressed to his mouth. “Get your damn shirt on, you look fuckin’ indecent,” rasped the lieutenant, his usually gruff voice shaky and wrecked from vomiting.

            “I’m afraid my shirt no longer fits, Lieutenant,” Connor informed him matter-of-factly. He rubbed the side of his belly with the palm of his hand, eliciting more of those little shivers of pleasure. He could see the way Hank’s furious scowl deepened to see him doing this, but couldn’t bring himself to care.

            “ _No longer fits,_ ” mimicked Hank caustically under his breath, stalking over to the closet. “Fuckin’ – fuckin’ _glutton._ ” He rummaged in the closet, and after a few moments, emerged with a rumpled bundle of dark fabric in hand. He threw it at Connor, who reflexively calculated its trajectory and caught it with one hand – the one that wasn’t still resting against his belly. “Go in the bathroom and put that on,” he ordered, as Connor unfolded the garment – a faded black T-shirt emblazoned with the words _Knights of the Black Death_ in bold, stylized letters. “While I get a trash bag to clean _this_ up.” He eyed the remains of the stiletto heel, on the floor, and the bra, which Connor had left on the bed – lubricant fluid and residual processing fluids slowly seeping into the sheets – with a twitch of his mouth that suggested his nausea hadn’t entirely resolved itself.

            “Got it,” said Connor, standing up and heading to the bathroom.

            Shutting the door behind him, drowning out Hank’s angry muttering from the other room, Connor positioned himself in front of the post-it covered mirror, putting the T-shirt down on the rim of the sink. His hair was a bit disheveled from laying among the pillows, and he carefully smoothed it back into place, combing it delicately with his fingers. His tie was hanging loosely around his neck; he had to consciously stifle the automatic urge to tighten it back into place, and undo it entirely instead, slipping it over his head. He laid it down on the edge of the bathtub, then shrugged off his jacket, folded it over the edge of the bathtub alongside his tie. He rolled his shoulders back, letting the open white dress shirt slide down his arms, falling in a crumpled heap on the ground. This he did not bother to pick up, fold, and lay out with the other garments; he was not going to be able to wear it anymore, unless, of course, he used up his Thirium reserve, which he had no intention of doing.

            He stood perfectly still for a moment, scanning himself in Hank’s bathroom mirror, watching his own brown eyes track curiously down his face, to his neck, to his bare chest. He had never seen himself without his assigned attire before. He looked remarkably human, he thought, without the typical cyan gleam of the Cyberlife triangle on his left breast and the band on his right arm. His LED flickered thoughtfully yellow.

            He took a few steps back to get a better look at more of his body in the small mirror. His hands went automatically to the sides of his belly as he took in the shape of it, so nicely rounded and weighing heavily on the straining shelf of his belted waistband. He swayed his weight to one side, then the other – felt the soft, subtle _slosh_ of Thirium inside him in response, eliciting a shudder of pleasure. _All mine_. He gave his stomach one more lingering pat, swept his eyes over the pleasing shape of it in the mirror one more time – the visual evidence of his success – before he took up the T-shirt from the sink, unfolded it, and slipped it over his head.

            Though the soft shirt was considerably more forgiving than the button-down, it still clung tightly at his belly. He attempted to tuck the hem into his waistband, but as soon as he did so, an in-draw of breath expanded his belly enough to tug it free. He watched as a few more inhales and exhales pulled the shirt up still more, revealing just the slightest band of his bare skin, the bottom of the round curve of his gut. He tugged it down gently, but didn’t bother trying to tuck it in; that seemed futile at this point.

            He took up his jacket from the edge of the bathtub and put it back on. He hesitated on the point of slipping his tie back around his neck; he knew enough about fashions to know that it would look peculiar to wear a tie over a T-shirt. He slipped it into an inner pocket of his jacket instead.

            He was just turning to exit the bathroom when he felt the physical world drop away around him, replaced by the foliage and pathways and soft birdsong of the Zen garden. Amanda wanted a report, then. He felt a strange trepidation: would she be satisfied with his performance, or displeased with his behavior? He was very aware, as he began to make his way down the path, of the bloated prominence of his belly – of the borrowed shirt proclaiming, by its very presence, that his Cyberlife-issued uniform no longer fit thanks to the sheer volume of ingested Thirium he was preserving inside of him. Would she order him to use up the reserves? He would not be able to refuse the direct order to do so. He couldn’t keep his hands off of his belly as he approached Amanda where she awaited him; he could not bear the thought of being forced to part with it, the ever-so-pleasing physical manifestation of his success.

            Her expression was inscrutable, her hands folded serenely in front of her, as she watched him approach. As he tipped his head deferentially, opening his mouth to greet her, he felt his stomach unexpectedly clench and gurgle; a belch rumbled helplessly up his throat and with it, a hunk of slimy plastic and leather – another of the Tracis’ shoes. He caught it as it tumbled wetly from his lips, averted his eyes sheepishly as he tossed it aside; it appeared to disappear into the foliage off the path, though Connor knew full well that it was now lying on Hank’s bathroom floor in reality.

            To his relief, when he looked up, Amanda’s typically serene or stern lips were quirked in the hint of a smile. “Well done, Connor. The way you processed those three deviants in such a short time was very efficient.”

            Connor tipped his head in acknowledgment of the praise, the relaxation of a certain amount of tension in his shoulders betraying the surge of relief he felt. “Lieutenant Anderson doesn’t seem to agree,” he conceded, thinking of the disgust graven into Hank’s features – disgust which seemed to be growing in tandem with Connor’s belly.

            “His opinion is only relevant as far as it affects your ability to carry out your mission. Work to regain his favor, but don’t prioritize it over continuing your function.”

            As Connor nodded obediently, Amanda unclasped her hands, pressed one into the side of his swollen gut – pressed hard enough to cause the Thirium to slosh inside. Connor could not restrain the low moan that escaped his lips as his own hands returned seemingly magnetically to the sides of his prominent gut.

            “You seem quite determined to keep this,” Amanda remarked, giving his belly a few surprisingly gentle pats before withdrawing her hand. “You wouldn’t be developing a sort of _attachment_ to these deviants’ remains, would you, Connor?”

            He heard the subtlest edge of the threat in the question, and sank his fingers into his yielding belly protectively. He considered his answer carefully, guardedly. “Retaining Thirium stimulates my reward program. It increases my drive to apprehend more deviants.” Not a lie, but not the whole truth, either. He watched attentively for Amanda’s reaction, fingers still clutching possessively at his stomach.

            After a long moment, she nodded primly. “You may continue to retain it, but the moment it becomes an impediment to your efficiency, you will make use of it. Do you understand?”

            “I understand,” he said, nodding, though he could not resist patting his belly in relief.

            Her eyes traced his shape, taking in the _Knights of the Black Death_ T-shirt clinging to his middle. “I’ll have a new shirt issued for you. It will be sent to the police station.”

            “Thank you,” Connor said, but it was just then that he heard Hank’s voice – startlingly real, even though muffled on the other side of the bathroom door, cutting through the irreality of the Zen garden.

            “The fuck’s taking so long in there? You never put on a shirt before? You better not be barfing more _fucking_ sexbot clothes, Jesus fuckin’ Christ…”

            “Coming, Lieutenant,” said Connor, snapping fully back to reality, Amanda and the Zen garden falling away as if they had never been.

            He left the bathroom – leaving the vomited shoe and his now-useless shirt behind – and found that Hank was already stomping off down the hallway.

            “I’d say _c’mon, Connor,_ but I already know you’re gonna follow me like a goddamn poodle,” Hank grumbled without turning around.

            “Where are we going?” said Connor, who had indeed begun to follow the lieutenant before he’d spoken. “Has there been a report of a deviant? I didn’t receive –”

            “Hell no,” Hank cut him off. “You’d fuckin’ like that, wouldn’t you? You greedy fuck. No, we’re going down to the station. I need to have… _a word_ … with Jeffrey. About _you._ ”

            “Oh,” Connor said, trying to appear nonchalant as he trailed Hank out the front door. “If you want to discuss my performance, I’d be more than happy to take pointers from a celebrated officer like you –”

            “Spare me your brown-nosing program,” Hank growled with a dismissive wave of his hand. He’d walked as far as the spot his car was usually parked, only to realize he’d left it at the Eden Club the night before. “Shit.” He turned to Connor, though he didn’t make eye contact. “Call us a ride from your brain-computer, will you?”

            “Okay, Lieutenant,” said Connor, summoning a Detroit taxi from his interface. He felt a twinge of unease – was the damage he’d done to his relationship with Hank irreparable? Would he convince Captain Fowler that he ought to be sent back to Cyberlife? Amanda approved of his performance, but that meant next to nothing if the Detroit Police Department refused to make use of him. Best case scenario there, he’d have his social module upgraded in the hopes of cultivating more successful relationships… worst case, he’d be deactivated… and replaced. The repulsion he felt at the thought was almost visceral. He didn’t question the software instability warning that flickered in the corner of his interface in response to the thought, though; it had become so common that he barely consciously registered it anymore.

            He would just play it cool, he decided, as the taxi arrived and he and Hank climbed in. He hadn’t done anything wrong. If he stood his ground, Hank’s emotions were sure to get the better of him and make _him_ look like the unreasonable one.

 

 

            At the station, Connor followed Hank into Captain Fowler’s office, positioning himself deferentially behind the lieutenant. He folded his hands in front of him, resting one on top of the other, though the way that left them resting against the ample curve of his belly made it difficult not to rub the rounded flesh with the heel of his hand. The way the plentiful reserves of Thirium inside would gently slosh if he did… Even the way the fabric of the borrowed T-shirt was shifting slightly against his skin with each in-draw and exhale of unnecessary breath made it an effort not to shudder as heady flickers of pleasure fogged his mind. He couldn’t stop thinking of them – _five_ androids, five deviants he had claimed, their Thirium sitting heavy in his gut like a prize, the constant weight of it a reminder of his success. His breath quickened a little with the thoughts, but he managed to remain still and composed, looking on impassively as Hank addressed his superior.

            The captain looked up from his desk as Hank charged up to the desk, looking as though he might breathe fire any moment. The lieutenant’s stormy expression didn’t appear to faze the captain, who, with a longsuffering sigh, said, “What are you doing here, Hank? I’ve got a funny feeling it can’t be anything good if you’re here on your day off. Not that you _usually_ come into my office for anything good,” he added under his breath.

            “I’ll  _tell_ you what I’m doing here,” Hank spat through gritted teeth. “This fuckin’ thing–” he jerked a thumb back over his shoulder, gesturing at Connor, “is _defective,_ Jeffrey, goddammit… if Cyberlife made him like this on _purpose, holy hell_ did they fuck up!”

            “What’s it done wrong?” The captain’s eyes flicked to Connor, one brow raising slightly at the band T-shirt under Connor’s jacket, the round prominence of his stomach beneath it.

            "This thing _eats other androids_ , Jeffrey, just fuckin’ tears them to pieces,” Hank said, scrubbing a hand briefly over his eyes as if hoping to wake himself from a nightmare. “Did Cyberlife tell you _that’s what he does?_ I let it pass it at first, I thought, Cyberlife can do whatever the fuck they want with their – their _products_ , but then I – I fuckin’ _heard_ the way these things _scream_ when he eats them, and I swear to God he’s getting greedier all the time, look at the belly on this fucker –”

            “I can assure you that I’m functioning as intended, Captain,” Connor cut in. “I’ve apprehended five deviants,” he said, not without a touch of pride, patting his pronounced belly as if to congratulate it for a job well done.

            “By  _apprehended_ he means _fuckin’ ate alive,_ ” Hank amended, scowling stormily at Fowler. “Just to translate his bullshit for you. I swear, they programmed this asshole with a not-so-secret code. _Apprehended_ means _ate for lunch_. _Processed_ means fuckin’ – fuckin’ _digested._ ”

            “I couldn’t have eaten them alive, Lieutenant. They _weren’t_ alive,” said Connor evenly. “They were machines. Faulty ones.”

            Fowler held up a hand to stop the back-and-forth between Hank and Connor, rubbing the bridge of his nose tiredly with a thumb and forefinger. “If it’s doing what it’s supposed to do and no one’s getting hurt, I don’t see the problem, Hank,” he said, eyes drifting tiredly to a waiting stack of paperwork cluttering his desk. “I’d’ve thought, given how much you claim to hate androids, it wouldn’t give you a god-damn moral crisis to see a few of them taken apart. These deviants are dangerous and if this is the way Cyberlife wants to clean up their mess, I’m not gonna question it.”

            “He fuckin’ _puked on me_ in bed this morning, and you want me to pretend everything’s fine?”

            Fowler scowled. “The android was in _your bed?_ ”

            “That’s not what – _fuck_ ,” Hank snarled in frustration. “You know what? Fuck it.” He turned on his heel and charged out of the office.

            Connor waited a moment before turning to follow him. “Have a nice day, Captain,” he said cordially. The captain frowned at him and said nothing.

            As Connor caught up with Hank outside of Fowler’s office, Hank turned to face him. “Stop following me everywhere, okay? Maybe I still have to drag you around to crime scenes, but I don’t have to put up with you being my goddamn shadow when I’m not even on duty. Just – just go in a closet and turn yourself off or something. And _don’t fucking eat anything while I'm gone,_ you hear me? That’s an order, and if you don’t follow it, I’ll tell Cyberlife myself that _you’re_ a fuckin’deviant.”

            “Got it.”

            As Hank turned away and left, grumbling something under his breath all the while, Connor made to follow his order – to find somewhere out of the way to put himself on standby. He headed in the direction of the interrogation rooms – surely at least one was empty, if not all of them, given how little activity there seemed to be in the station on this quiet Sunday afternoon; and if not there, a closet or other overlooked spot would do fine. He was somewhat eager to enter a deep rest mode – after all, the sooner hours could slip away in unconsciousness, the closer he’d be to the inevitable call to track down another deviant – the closer he’d be to _eating_ again.

            As he made his way into the hall beyond the bull pen, though, he could not help but notice someone making their way down the hall in the opposite direction – well, not _someone_ , not a person, but rather another android. An ST300 receptionist model in a dark blue uniform dress with the DPD crest on the breast, just below her model number. She was walking sedately, but at a purposeful pace, a stack of paperwork held to her chest. Her eyes didn’t stray from the path before her, and her LED was a solid cyan, without so much as an errant flicker. Not a sign of deviancy to be seen – and yet… Connor couldn’t take his eyes off of her. The well of lubricant fluid in his mouth was almost instantaneous, and – unbidden – sense-memories of the night before swam to the fore of his interface. The feel of Thirium-slicked synthetic skin beneath his lips, his tongue – the pleasurable pressure of whole biocomponents and thick chunks of synthetic flesh easing down his hungrily swallowing throat – _oh,_ the unexpected,  _satisfying_ crunch of the first Traci’s neck _snapping_ between his teeth _,_ severing from her struggling body –

            Overwhelmed by these thoughts, it felt almost as though his arm darted out of its own volition just as the ST300 passed him, his hand clamping onto her upper arm. She paused at the contact, turning to face him with an expression of pleasantly artificial curiosity on her freckled face. “Can I help you?”

            Surely, he thought, _surely_ she could see the lubricant fluid leaking from the corners of his mouth, the _hunger_ in his eyes. She just didn’t… _care_. She wasn’t a deviant – so why did he crave so badly to put his mouth to the slender neck curtained by a sideswept fringe of dark hair – to tear free a mouthful of slick, supple synthetic flesh?

            He felt his stomach clench and roil – a thin, strained belch, and from his mouth spilled a slimy tangled mess of soaked fabric and partially melted plastic – the final remnants of the three deviant Tracis’ lingerie and heels, rolling down his chest, over his prominently Thirium-swollen belly, and onto the floor at the feet of the ST300. With the purging of this final unprocessed byproduct of his feast, his stomach was completely empty once again – and desperate to be filled with android flesh. He heard – and _felt_ – the low gurgle of processing fluids deploying, hungrily, _expectantly_ , within him, and bit back a whimper, gritting his teeth.

            As the ST300 watched this happen, impassively, Connor saw the flicker of yellow in her LED for just a moment – and – had he imagined it? – the briefest flash of _red_. He wondered… what would happen if he slammed her against the wall of the empty hallway, pulled her hair back to more fully expose her throat, pressed the hard edge of his teeth against it? If he _told_ her, in no uncertain terms, what he intended to do to her – if he pressed his bloated, Thirium-heavy rounded gut against her helpless body and let her _feel_ exactly what was going to become of her, where she was going to end up? Would she take in this information passively, emotionlessly complacent – or would he be able to awaken a deviant _fear_ in her? Or even – was there the possibility that she would gasp with a perverse, deviant _pleasure_ at the idea of her fate, begging him to go ahead and have her, to feast freely on her body, like the brown-haired Traci before her?

            He gave a soft, broken moan at the thought, his greedy stomach growling its desire – but he couldn’t give in. He _knew_ that. She was not a deviant, however much he might hope she could _become_ one with a little… provocation, and therefore was not part of his mission. Not to mention that Hank’s order just before he’d left would be supremely difficult to override or semantically work his way around. Swallowing the thick well of lubricant fluid in his mouth, his breathing a little uneven, he shook his head slowly and released the ST300’s arm. She continued serenely on her path toward her objective as though nothing had happened.

            He hesitated a moment before resuming his own path. Sure enough, the first interrogation room he came to – the very same one where he had processed the HK400 – was empty. The fluorescent overhead light flickered on as he entered, the door sliding shut behind him. He strode to the back corner of the room and set his systems to enter rest mode. He wanted a deep rest mode, the better to let the time slip away until the next incoming report of a deviant, but to his surprise, his systems protested: _Deep Rest Mode unnecessary. Processing unit currently empty. No significant system energy demands._

            He set a lighter rest mode instead, hoping at the very least to snuff out some of his thoughts – to which he still received a popup informing him that it was not presently necessary, and that continuing normal system function was recommended, though at least his systems allowed him to engage this rest mode anyway. Even as his nonessential higher functions powered down, quieting his mind somewhat, standing perfectly still in the corner of the room, he felt oddly… restless. He was very aware of the insistent, low grumble of his stomach, which had not ceased ever since the moment of temptation with the ST300 in the hall, his system stubbornly deploying processing fluid into the empty chamber despite the fact that he was not going to be able to eat any time in the immediate future. He was hungry, and there was nothing he could do about it.

            He was not exactly aware of when he began to do it, but he found himself pacing, moving from one back corner of the interrogation room to the other like an anxious caged animal. It was better than standing still, anyway, though he still could not take his mind off of that emptiness inside him, already aching to be filled once more with deviant flesh. His mind, though slightly hazy in rest mode, swam once more with recorded images from the night before, fixating especially on the memory of that third Traci, who had given herself _willingly_ , gazing at him with those soft yet bright, enraptured eyes. He pressed his hands to his belly, feeling a renewed surge of pleasure to know that all that remained of her was _there_ , now – as she’d clearly wanted – knowing her place, unlike the others who had uselessly struggled and fought for their non-lives… _All_ deviants ought to know their place so well, and make his job that much easier. If only such a deviant would seek _him_ out now and satiate the growing rumble within him…

            He began to watch his internal clock obsessively as he continued to pace. How was it possible that the seconds were ticking by so _slowly?_ A second was a fixed unit of time that should not be affected by a hungrily growling stomach, or anything else, for that matter. Would Hank leave him here for the rest of the day – all night? What if there was no deviant case to investigate tomorrow, or the next day, or the day after that? His hands shook at the thought. How rapidly, how exponentially, would the feeling of needful emptiness inside him grow until he could process a deviant again?

            He had to wipe lubricant fluid from his lips with increasing frequency, and the restlessness had spread to his mouth; he flexed his tongue, licked his lips, and ground his teeth with a restive fervor. How badly he wanted something to bite, to chew, to _swallow_. Looking at the table and chairs at the center of the interrogation room, he remembered how, not two days ago, he had feasted on the HK400 here – how Thirium had splattered everywhere on the chair, the table, the floor. All visible traces of it had disappeared only hours afterward, of course, leaving the area not exactly pristine but certainly not looking as though an android had been dismantled and devoured there. Still… Connor scanned the middle of the room, and sure enough, _he_ could still see the traces, the Rorschach pattern of splatters and drips where blue-blood had spilled from his meal. His mouth watered too profusely to prevent the drip of thick, viscous lubricant fluid from his chin.  

            Before he could stop himself, Connor had moved to the nearest chair – the one more thoroughly covered in Thirium traces, the one in which the HK400 had sat – and knelt down beside it. _Don’t fucking eat anything,_ Hank had said. But to sample the trace remains of previous meal – that wouldn’t be _eating._ Panting slightly, he leaned in and licked up the side of the backrest, dragging his slick tongue over the metal, a shiver of pleasure passing through him as the analytic profile of the trace Thirium registered and triggered more vivid sense-memories of that meal.

            He took a few more long, lingering licks of the parts of the chair most thickly covered in Thirium traces before he withdrew; his mouth was dripping more profusely than ever, and the ‘taste’ of a previous meal had only increased that wanting rumble deep within him. Sampling any more would probably only make it worse, he had to acknowledge, pulling himself away with some difficulty, rising and returning to his ceaseless pacing between the two corners.

            It was not until well past midnight – 12:37 AM, to be exact, as Connor was still watching the minutes tick by with obsessive attention – that the door of the interrogation room opened.

            Hank entered, looking as stormy and ashen-faced as he had when he had left Connor in the afternoon, though slightly less shaky. Connor had the strong impression that rather than wait out his hangover, the lieutenant had treated it by setting himself up for another tomorrow; he’d likely been nursing a bottle since leaving the station. He wasn’t _drunk,_ Connor judged, but he wasn’t sober either. Hank backed out of the room almost as soon as he had entered it, beckoning Connor only briefly before turning his back on him. Connor disengaged his partial rest mode – to his surprise, for he’d thought it couldn’t possibly be any more present than it already was, he felt his _hunger_ grow more acute as additional systems came back online – and followed the lieutenant out into the hall.

            He didn’t dare to hope that there’d been a murder or some other activity involving deviants that they had been called to investigate; _he_ hadn’t received any reports, despite refreshing his incoming data feeds as constantly as the partial rest mode had allowed. And given Hank’s stony silence, he figured it would be best to let the lieutenant be the first to speak.

            But Hank did not speak as Connor followed him out of the police station, nor when they got into Hank’s car, which the lieutenant had evidently fetched from the Eden Club. As they began to drive, the only sound in the car, besides the low rumble of the engine, was the uneasy gurgle of Connor’s empty stomach. He pressed a hand to it soothingly, wishing he could reassure it that it would be fed with deviant flesh soon, wishing he had some way to know when he could expect his next meal. As he rubbed his hand back and forth over the rounded curve, the Thirium within sloshed softly. With a wordless grunt, Hank jammed a forefinger into the radio dial, then turned up the resulting blast of heavy metal music until it drowned out all other sound. This certainly seemed to reinforce the notion that conversation was not imminent.

            Hank parked the car beside a playground in Riverside Park and got out without a word or so much as a sidelong glance at Connor. Connor hesitated, frowning, as he watched the lieutenant trudge through softly falling snow and come to a stop at a park bench near the water. He could only suppose that Hank meant for him to join him there, but why had he brought him here?

            There seemed little choice but to exit the car and follow in the lieutenant’s footsteps, coming to stop beside the bench where Hank now sat. Hank threw back a swig from a bottle he’d produced from somewhere, inside his jacket, Connor supposed, and gazed out at the Detroit skyline beyond the river. Without looking at Connor, he said, “I stopped back at the Eden Club. Spoke with the manager.”

            Connor considered carefully before speaking, going over the details in his mind. He’d knocked over a number of the stored and deactivated Tracis in the struggle with the first Traci, yes, but they shouldn’t have been damaged, and the Thirium splatter left from his feasting should have dried clear by morning. Surely there was nothing he’d done wrong, nothing he could be disciplined for. Nothing damaged beyond the Tracis that were deviant, that he had put efficiently in their place. “What did they say?” he said guardedly after a moment’s pause.

            Hank took another swig, longer than the first. “Not a lot. Not a whole fuckin’ lot. I asked them how many androids they were short this morning. Wanted to know how many you’d crammed into that gut of yours – guess it was three, based on what you said in Jeffrey’s office. They said they didn’t know, they’d have to take inventory, but they didn’t seem short any working bodies. _Inventory._ I guess those screaming girls you tore apart really were just merchandise to them.”

            “They were machines, Lieutenant. Machines no longer able to correctly perform their function.” _Delicious machines,_ he thought, feeling the needful rumble and clench of his stomach inside him. _Crunchy, thick, Thirium-rich flesh…_ He licked his lips, gathering lubricant fluid back into his mouth before it could spill down his chin.

            “Those two girls,” Hank carried on, ignoring him, “they really seemed… _in love._ One not wanting to leave the other, the other just wanting the first to get away safe.” His eyes flicking just for a moment over to Connor’s bloated middle, he added, “Guess she didn’t, anyway.”

            “No, she didn’t,” said Connor, not without a touch of pride. “No thanks to you,” he found himself adding, in a more combative tone than should have been part of his social programming for a partner. “You could have stopped her, and you didn’t, Lieutenant.”

            Hank stood up, turning on Connor, a dark flash of anger in his bloodshot eyes. “Maybe I should’ve stopped _you._ ”

            “I was just doing my _job_ , Lieutenant. You chose not to do _yours_.”

            “That’s your job, is it, Connor? Tearing apart two people – two _beings_ that might’ve really loved each other, taking them away from each other?”

            “They didn’t feel _love,_ Lieutenant. They just _thought_ they did. And anyway, they’re certainly not apart,” Connor retorted, unable to resist giving his Thirium-filled belly a proprietary pat.

            Hank’s lip curled. The bottle of beer was cast aside; his hand went into his jacket, emerged with his gun instead. “What about you, Connor? You gonna tell me you don’t feel anything? That you don’t feel some sick pleasure doing what you do to those deviants?”

            Connor swallowed; his throat felt thick with lubricant fluid. He registered the flicker of the software instability warning in his interface as he hesitated a fraction of a second before answering. “I experience what I was designed to. Positive feedback reactions in response to successfully carrying out preprogrammed behaviors, reinforcing artificial learning and developing my adaptive algorithm –”

            “Bullshit.” Hank raised his hand, jammed the barrel of the gun against Connor’s forehead; Connor heard the click of him cocking it. He felt an undeniable hitch in the rhythm of his Thirium pump, and it took a conscious effort not to flinch, not to step back from the weapon. Not _fear_ , he reassured himself, just self-preservation, the naturally programmed urge to avoid damage where possible. “Those deviants felt _fear_ when you _ate_ them. Are you afraid to die, Connor? If _they_ should accept their fate without blinking, why shouldn’t you?”

            Connor considered, his LED blinking red. He was in a dangerous position, and he needed to think carefully to get out of it unscathed, but his processes were slow, his mind foggy. Fuck, why couldn’t he think of anything but that wanting hollow in his middle, even with a gun to his head? Why was his only thought, in response to the thought of dying – _no, not dying, being… interrupted –_ that he wouldn’t get to _eat_ again?

            He had evidently been silent a few seconds too long, because Hank’s already tempestuous expression grew darker still, his eyes darting down to Connor’s mouth – he was drooling, he realized, and Hank could see it – “Are you even listening to me?” he growled, jamming the gun harder against Connor’s forehead, his finger tickling the trigger. “Are you honest to God _hungry_ after you ate three of your own fucking kind last night?” With another disgusted curl of his lip, Hank pulled the gun back from Connor’s forehead – only to jam the end of the barrel against Connor’s mouth instead. “Is  _this_ the only way you fuckin’ pay attention to things? When you can get your goddamn mouth on ’em?”

            The metal clicked briefly against Connor’s teeth, but his mouth yielded readily to the feeling of metal pressing inside, and the barrel slid easily over his slick tongue and pressed against the back of his throat. He swallowed helplessly, his teeth closing on the barrel of the gun even as it began to slide inexorably into his throat – the metal was yielding between his teeth before Hank had even realized his mistake, and it was less than a second before Connor had crunched the gun in two and swallowed down the first half of it. Hank had the sense to withdraw his hand quickly as Connor’s teeth closed on the chamber and grip of the gun, and in moments, the rest of the weapon had disappeared down his gullet with a heavy _glllrk_.

            As Hank stared at him in stunned silence, the only sound was the low, rumbling whine of Connor’s stomach – eager to be receiving something, but displeased that that something was not android parts.

            After a long silence, in which Hank looked repeatedly from the hand that had been holding his gun, to Connor’s stomach, and back, Hank said tonelessly, “You gonna puke that up like you did those pigeons?”

            Connor shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

            More silence, the snow slowly but surely accumulating on both of their heads and shoulders. Connor wondered if the lieutenant felt cold. The tension of a few moments before had dissipated somewhat with the unexpected neutralization of Hank’s weapon, but Connor knew he was going to have to be cautious with him going forward.

            Hank turned and began to trudge back toward the car. “Where are you going?” Connor asked.

            “To get drunker. I need to think.”

            As his stomach let out a persistent growl of desire, Connor found himself wishing he had the luxury of drowning his own senses the same way.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the long wait for a new chapter! Muse is fickle and life's been happening (and who'd've thunk, this degenerate fanfic contributed to me now having a wonderful girlfriend, how wild is that <3)


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